2008 Woodie Awards
Stitching a Home Together
Meredith Ponder
Issue date: 8/27/08 Section: Arts and Entertainment
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The exhibition consists of two related installations, [Swi:t] Home, 2000-2001, on view through September 21, and [Swi:t] Home: A Chant, 2001-2006, on view through November 13. As Kristin Guiter, Manager of Media Relations for the Corcoran stated, "The installations explore the passage of time and the ways that daily routine and large-scale events shape ideas about place and home."
The first exhibition, [Swi:t] Home, is a portrait of Del Rivero's everyday life. In July 2000, the artist placed 20 large sheets of paper on the floor of her apartment. She left these pieces of paper on the floor for six months, where they recorded traces of home. Footprints, spilled food, paint and other materials mark the pieces of paper. After six months, Del Rivero stitched them together into five large dishcloths, using varied colors of embroidery floss and many different kinds of stitches.
At the Corcoran, these large paper dishcloths are suspended from the ceiling, allowing visitors to see all sides of Del Rivero's existence. Other textile works by the artist are on display alongside [Swi:t] Home, including a nest of woven paper, books and maps. Together, the pieces invoke warm feelings and a sense of calm domesticity, allowing the viewer to feel comfortable in Del Rivero's space.
"Using the phonetic spelling in the first word of the title, Del Rivero's piece evokes both 'suite,' as in a series of works, but also 'sweet,' with all its associations of the memories and comforts of home," states Guiter.
The second installation, [Swi:t] Home: A Chant, features another side of home: a home destroyed and rebuilt. On September 11, 2001, Del Rivero's apartment, which faced the World Trade Center towers, was destroyed along with the towers. Her windows were blown in, and her home was filled with ash, smoke and debris. To make sense of this tragedy, the artist, with the help of assistants, began to carefully count, document, and number each of the more than three thousand pieces of paper and debris she found in her apartment. Over the next five years, she stitched them into a curtain of sewn paper more than five hundred feet long.
This installation at the Corcoran is beautiful and haunting. Five rolls of paper are draped from the ceiling in tent-like fashion, permitting the viewer to see all sides of this piece. An original score, Bring Light, composed by Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris, plays in the background. The soundtrack evokes thoughts of September 11th with its shifts in tempo and volume and creates a somewhat somber yet anxious atmosphere.
Each scrap is carefully stitched onto the paper used for the installation, with pearl beads interwoven among these burnt remains. From legal briefings to magazine cutouts to finance print-outs, these remnants tell the story of both the people who worked in the World Trade Center and of a home damaged and broken. Particularly moving were scraps from the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 employees, all of its employees in the office that day in New York City. A half-singed Cantor Fitzgerald invoice, lovingly sewn, rests among receipts and family photos.
The two exhibitions, though seemingly contrary, are actually more like halves of the same sense of home. "The materials, as well as the form and ideas behind [[Swi:t] Home: A Chant], came directly from the events of September 11th. But I felt it was important to show how Chant also came out of the artistic concerns Del Rivero has been developing for decades," said Sarah Newman, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran. "The two works together represent a kind of 'before and after.'"
As Guiter explains in the press release, for Del Rivero, "paper became a medium through which to both register and present the effects of activity and time," the elements on which both installations are fundamentally based. Also, "both of Del Rivero's installations deal with the passage of time and the connections between lived experience, memory and the creative process. As intimate responses to public events, they blur the line between art and life."
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is located at 500 17th Street NW. Admission is free until September 3.
Ponder is Managing Editor and an American Studies senior.
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