HESCAH Lecture: Jenni Sorkin

Join us for a talk by Jenni Sorkin, Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara: “Deviant Scale.”

Intense and immersive, the immediacy of cloth is its evocation of the body. Conveying abstraction, embodiment and corporeality in the shadow of U.S.-based Culture Wars, and the global AIDS epidemic, 1990s-era sculptural textile practices offered dynamic structures in which cloth was manipulated, folded, stacked, clustered, layered, and sewn, through repetitive accretions, to approximate sizes, shapes, and contours of the body. In an era that fostered social and political inequities, textiles were repeatedly employed as allegories of repair, mending, and healing. This paper will address the complexities and biases aimed at 1990s textile-based installation in relation to the female-identified body, ideologies of abjection, and problems of scale.