Satellite Art Show - Duo Booth with Abby Cheney Brooklyn, NY - June 2024
Documentation by Yi Hsuan Lai, IG @flaneurshan.studio
81 Leonard Gallery is pleased to present Warp and Weft, a duo exhibition of New York-based artists Abby Cheney and Rochelle Voyles at Satellite Art Show. Cheney’s architectural paper pulp sculptures and Voyles’ 2D and 3D cut-paper collages find their foundations in the language of textiles, which offers structure and pattern as both a reliable guide and departure point for investigations into the material, personal, and societal. Within each artist’s distinct relationship to textiles and craft are notions of the domestic interrupted and abstraction as agency.
Central to Abby Cheney’s process of building sculpture from soft materials is the criss-crossing of elements to create structure and stability. Essentially weaving with cardboard before sculpting the surface with paper pulp, Cheney achieves forms that lean, slouch, and bend, subverting their own rigidity with evidence of their once-softness. Soft Drum incorporates weaving with actual fabric into its belly-like cavity, making the sculpture simultaneously a weaving and a loom. Gauze snakes through space, creating a semi-permeable boundary for the fair booth. Windows of negative space created by the latticework offer various perspectives inward to the fair and to Rochelle Voyles’ work across from it, sparking a dialogue with the linework and negative space within Voyles’ looping sculptures and paper collages.
Voyles derives the forms in her work from fiber diagrams and patterns, many of which are sourced from books belonging to familial matriarchs. The artist finds comfort in their instructive nature, using the diagrams and patterns as the starting point in work that navigates turmoil, chaos, and contradiction. Self-Replicating Fear and Fabric of Time grapple with anxiety and fear, considering various methods of coping. In Self-Replicating Fear, the replication cycle of anxiety is mirrored in the repetitive crochet patterns and nightmarish images of horror and pain collaged on the surface. Fabric of Time, inspired by embroidery patterns, presents a visual unraveling and more peaceful view of reality, including images of nature and the built environment weathered by time.
In weaving, the warp is stretched first to build tension for the weft, which carries almost none. Rochelle Voyles’ and Abby Cheney’s works hold this contradiction between strong and soft, structure and freedom, tension and slack.