Karen Reimer
Virginia Meredith: Born Again
Karen Reimer’s 28 embroidered works at Beret suggest a desire to remake the world–or at least printed matter and some handwritten notes–in cloth and thread. Reimer often reproduces pages from books with black thread on white cloth, but she’s also made fabric replicas of candy wrappers, a parking ticket, a Popeye’s soft drink cup, receipts, and a completed crossword puzzle, using colored fabric and thread to re-create the color in the original.
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Reimer grew up on a farm in Kansas, where she was born in 1958, and learned to sew as a girl. Not surprisingly, she mentions Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger as influences, and in fact most of her choices of texts are hardly naive. St. John I shows the famous beginning of John linking God with the Word. The Spectator shows both text from A Short History of the Printed Word and a facsimile of a page from the famous 18th-century literary periodical, its tiny text rendered as dots and dashes. Reimer’s choices often reflect a gently ironic view of both printed pages and the works she makes of them. It’s hard to have “faith in documents” when one cannot read the words; the title of The Spectator and the largest words in it address the viewer. Even the stitched version of a receipt whose largest word is a “Paid” stamp seems self-conscious, reminding the viewer that all the works here are for sale.
More Value shows the envelope that an American Express solicitation came in. The fabric is torn to replicate the way the envelope was ripped open, the oblong address window is cut out of the fabric, and tiny black stitches represent the computer-generated bars on the bottom of the envelope–a pattern created entirely by machines. At least the advertising slogan–“More Value”–was written by some committee of consumer-psychology experts, but by also stitching the bar codes, untouched by human creativity, Reimer redresses in a way I found truly moving the complete loss of a human presence in objects of the postindustrial age.
The painters’ mixture of photographic realism and unnatural poses reminds the viewer of the artificial, constraining nature of sexual fantasies. Ultimately No. 7 Girls has an almost unpleasant edge: these women are trapped not only by the male eye but by the male imagination that created their stances–one can almost hear a photographer yelling at them to put out a little more attitude, just as one can see the painters piling on more color. Davis and Langlois are too honest and self-aware to simply accept the fantasies they want to wallow in, so they produce intelligent, uneasy mixes of beauty and self-conscious artifice, pictures that at once attract and repel us.
Sometimes thrift-shop paintings have an odd interest–there have even been traveling exhibits of the more eccentric ones. Meredith’s Inflatable Adult Porno Sheep, Baby takes as its background a strange blue landscape with abstract elements, bands of color and three dark blue squares hovering in the sky. Meredith paints inflatable sheep with red lipstick over these squares, completely obscuring the middle one; below them a baby doll floats, presumably counting sheep. The combined weirdness of Meredith’s additions and the original strange landscape are what give the work its real strength. One can see that the nude doll’s body is in sections, and the painting comes to seem a study in artificiality.
