Lea Feinstein: Chrysalis
Keystone Art Space Gallery
September 28 - October 7, 2024
Lea Feinstein pushes the sculptural potential of Tyvek, a lightweight and durable nonwoven material - cutting, sewing, pleating, and weaving new and recycled works—and transforms them into vibrant new forms. A live performance features twenty enthusiastic models walking the runway in unique sculptural garments.
Artist Statement: A curatorial suggestion to “make sculptures” when during a residency, I had access to a roll of Tyvek and a sewing machine. I created closed and open forms—cocoons and sleeves as well as dangling and knitted forms—and looking for how to view them, I hung them on available light fixtures. Eureka. Display and illumination enhance the forms and show another characteristic of the material, its translucency.
I continued to explore “open forms” and “closed forms” recruiting ready-made structures that I could weave into and around, playing on concepts of “inside vs outside” Found baskets and wire forms provided intricate and evocative challenges/armatures to play with. And gave me an opportunity to reuse and recycle older two-dimensional works. by finely cutting stained and painted older works into thin strips, I was able to give those “skins” a new life. New bright white Tyvek sheets, similarly cut into thin strips could be woven or gathered in bundles and cascades. Stitching, pleating, pulling and gathering, sewing techniques as well as folding and creasing gave three-dimensionality to this resolutely 2-D material. yielding more opportunities for soft unstructured 3-d forms.
The wearable sculptures came into being through play. Using the body as an armature, a scaffolding for the Tyvek skins, making the pieces move in space, getting inside the pieces liberated them from stands and walls and gave them life. They occupy an indeterminate zone that is not quite clothing, not quite sculpture, somewhere in the realm of costume.
There is a lot of precedent for this in the art historical lexicon. costume as fine art. Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus of the 1920s made and wore fantastically shaped costumes and performed in them. Hannah Weiner and Co. in the 60-90s New York performed poetry Fashion shows. Julie Taymor’s Bread and Circus Puppet Theater of the 1960s (leading up to Broadway Lion King) turned costumes into participatory theater.
The idea of Chrysalis is a container for all this work. Taken from the transformational stage many insects/butterflies pass through, the chrysalis is neither larva nor butterfly, but the cocooned gestational stage, where extreme formal changes occur under wraps, inside a cover. The Tyvek garments are covered themselves, and skins—burned, stenciled, dyed, crushed, and wrinkled. Like human skin, they age and wrinkle, grow softer with age and use, burnished and embellished with fissures, marks, and stains.