By Stanley A. Miller
When technology and art meet, the fusion can make digital wizardry the star of the show or it can simply be a creative means to an end.
A new exhibit featuring craftwork at the Milwaukee Art Museum shows how technology can be harnessed as basic building blocks of creativity. “The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft” shows technology broken down and blended into craft as seamlessly as wood, glass, metal or clay.
“Technology is inherent to the expression of these works, and they might not exist without it,” says Fo Wilson, curator and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “The thing that ties all these together is how they use the ones and zeros.”
For example, Nathalie Miebach’s “Warm Winter” lists “data” as a material used to weave her work of reed and wood. The intricate and chaotic combination of curves and abrupt angles represents research recorded from the environment. It even includes a key listing which materials represent what elements, including water, wind and sand. “Data determined what the piece looks like,” Wilson says. “You can read her work as a piece of science.”
The use of digital technology is just as important but more subtle in “Madam CJ Walker,” a massive array of black plastic hair combs arranged in the image of the African-American businesswoman.
Artist Sonya Clark took an image of the historical business icon, pixilated it using a computer and then used the positive and negative spaces of missing teeth in the combs to build the visage.
The pixilation intensifies as viewers move around the black-and-white plastic tapestry, which is as curious to see up close as it is from far away. The materials and technological technique magnify Clark’s metaphor: Walker made her fortune as a hair care entrepreneur marketing products to African-American women.
“The New Materiality” also has interactive craft creations reacting in the presence of people.
Rust and seaweed from its time under the sea are flaking off, and some rests on the museum’s floor. It’s a piece that looks as if it came from an alternate universe or a parallel timeline, fusing the synthetic and organic.
Many other works in “The New Materiality” show artists melding digital technologies into their handiwork in diverse ways. It’s an approach that worries some in the craft arts community, which honors the work of hand over the power of machines.
“The concern is that anything that moves us toward the machine is trying to take away something,” Wilson says. “I am not trying to take anything away from craft. I am just trying to add something.”
