Sam Gilliam at Pace NYC
Continuing Disruption: MSAB Grant Blog 2
I’ve been gathering scraps of canvas that have been lying around the studio for a few years. Some were unresolved starts. Some were leftovers. Some were just odd pieces that I had not quite known what to do with yet.
On a recent trip to New York, I saw Sam Gilliam: STITCHED at Pace Gallery. The exhibition focused on work connected to Gilliam’s 1993 residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in rural northern Ireland. Because his usual paints could not be shipped, Gilliam created a large group of painted and stained loose canvases in his Washington, D.C. studio, folded them up, and sent them ahead. Once in Ireland, he worked with a local seamstress, cutting and stitching those pre-painted canvases into new works.
It was an incredible exhibition, and it prodded hard at my own interest in unstretched canvas. Gilliam’s works were not simply paintings taken off the stretcher. They were paintings that had been cut, folded, stitched, handled, and rebuilt. The canvas was no longer just a surface. It became material, object, memory, evidence.
That matters to me right now.
As part of my MSAB grant project, I’ve been thinking a lot about disruption: how objects, seams, sticks, stones, shells, cuts, folds, and interruptions can change the logic of a painting. Not just visually, but physically. What happens when the painting refuses to behave like a neat rectangle on the wall? What happens when the surface gets interrupted, when the painting has to negotiate with something attached to it, embedded in it, or stitched into it?
These old scraps of canvas have started to feel less like leftovers and more like raw material. They carry earlier decisions, earlier failures, earlier questions. Bringing them back into the work feels like a way of continuing the disruption rather than resolving it too neatly.
That feels useful. Maybe even necessary.
Check out Mr Gilliam’s exhibition here: https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/sam-gilliam-stitched/
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
