Normal, IL
Everything I’m wearing right now is knit: my yellow-and-black kaffiyeh scarf, my grey wool trousers, my turquoise cotton top, my striped socks, even the beige compression garment on my left arm. I don’t think much about how they were knit, or where, or with what materials, or by whom. (Except for the compression garment, because it is specially constructed to alter my body through its medical-grade weave.) Jenna Richards thinks about these questions a lot, and poses some of them through her own knitted sculptures. One stands light as air, a gossamer column of columns machine-woven from regular and high-visibility fishing wire. Another droops darkly, hand twisted from red-and-grey fabric remnants cut into loops and strands. Fabric isn’t normally knit, nor is fishing wire, and Richards uses the anything-goes space of art to prove that these materials can be usefully put through those processes. Usefully might be the wrong word, though: art, for all its purpose, isn’t meant to be useful.
—Lori Waxman 3/26/16 11:17 AM