BACKSPACE.GALLERY
Elaine Luther:
Not-a-Quilts
October 24 - November 21, 2022
Opening Reception : November 17th 4pm-6pm
1st Floor Jack Arends Building, Dekalb IL
https://www.instagram.com/elaine_luther/
Time Lapse Video of Installation
Bio
Elaine Luther is an independent studio artist with a sense of humor. Her mission is to make art that’s brave, vulnerable and true, and sometimes funny.
Her art has been exhibited in Chicago and across the country, including at Gallery I/O in New Orleans, LA and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL. Solo shows include Harold Washington Library, West Englewood, Forest Park and Orland Park Public Libraries and multiple micro-galleries, including two in the U.K.
She regularly gives speeches at conferences and professional association meetings. She has been an Advisory Board member for Woman Made Gallery and an ambassador for the Self-Employment in the Arts Conference. Currently, she serves on the Marketing and Membership Committee for Woman Made Gallery, Chicago.
She has written for the Craft Industry Alliance and Moore Women Artists. She lives in Chicagoland with her family, where she’s also the gallerist for a series of 12” x 12” box galleries where she puts on shows of miniature art.
Artist Statement
Motherhood, art, death. It’s all tied up for me.
My brother Joe died during “the time of death.” That’s what we call it. In fifteen months, eight beloved people—family, friends, an infant—died.
For a while, my husband and I would say, “It can’t get any worse.” Then it would get worse, so we stopped saying that.
In 2005, my baby daughter died.
Before I had kids, I had lots of time, but nothing to say. Now, with three kids, I have no time, but I have something to say, and I’m not afraid. There’s tremendous power in tremendous loss.
I see the little bits and pieces left behind at the playground—a barrette, a pencil, a scrap of ribbon. Who left it? Did they notice it was gone?
I see the mystery of a little piece of a broken toy, how it becomes unrecognizable. What is it? What was its purpose?
Ordinary things like a bread tab inspire a new design in my jewelry.
These are the things that make up my daily life as a mom— bread tabs and lost barrettes and parts of broken toys.
I find meaning, and solace, and remembrance in the ordinary things that are left behind.
Show Statement
How do you get people to appreciate the work you’re doing when they’re benefitting from your labor, yet not noticing that you’re doing it? Women’s work - their physical labor, their emotional labor -often goes unpaid, underpaid, unnoticed and under appreciated.
With this artwork, I invite people to notice by making it beautiful, by drawing people in, to look more closely. I collect vintage, handmade doilies, in order to print them as photograms using light sensitive dye. Though most people think of lace and doilies as out of style and boring, once they’re transformed into blue and white they become captivating.
These are printed on vintage hankies, which themselves have crocheted edges, so the handwork of unknown women shows up again and again in the work, layer upon layer. That the women are unknown, that their work was sold, cheaply, or given away, is another level of commentary in my work.
Beyond the blue and white, the show includes real, skeletonized leaves, which have been collaged with bits of handwritten letters received by the artist over the years. Fragments of conversation, of long ago gossip, are captured in these leaves. Letters, expressions of love and reports from back home, from those now dead, or contact lost, are all hinted at in bits and pieces on leaves. Sometimes these leaves come together in the form of butterflies. Leaves and butterflies fly across the gallery walls, sometimes singly, and sometimes coming together in larger works.
These text fragments on leaves are about former selves, old identities, and also symbolize family ties, relationships, and the emotional labor usually performed by women.
I most overtly address unpaid labor through a series of time cards, displayed along with a real, vintage time clock. There’s one collaged time card for each day of the week, each one representing a different category of work that women/mothers perform.
Taken all together, viewers take in the range of labor women perform to create a home life for others, raise children, keep connected with family near and far, all while maintaining her own friendships, interests and life. The hope is that by drawing people in with beauty and mystery, they will reflect on the issue of labor in their lives and the lives of those around them.