Phantom Haptics was an exhibition I curated at Friend of a Friend Gallery, a project space in Denver, Colorado I co-directed with Derrick Velasquez.
As one of the oldest art forms in the memory of our species, textiles are specters of artistic, social, and cultural pasts. Phantom Haptics looks to the future of textiles, asking what the art form has become at a time when their innately somatic qualities are estranged from our hyper-digitized perceptions. The selected artists used textiles to either distance or ground themselves firmly within three modes of usage. Textiles are first and foremost sensory objects that require a great deal of manual manipulation in their production and are activated through touch. Textiles also function more metaphorically as connectors – works that are communally made and pay credence to a specific group, “touching” many through existing singularity. Finally, textiles have increasingly been used in contemporary work to offset other physical mediums, blurring the boundaries between ways of making and furthering multidimensional form.
Featuring work by Jordan Craig, Molly Haynes, Aaron McIntosh, John Paul Morabito, James Mullane, Aaron Storm, Stephanie Robison, & Hope Wang, Phantom Haptics was on view October 17 – November 21, 2021.
For more information on the exhibition, including my extended curatorial essay, download the full exhibition guide or visit Friend of a Friend’s website. Scroll below to see more images from the installation and works on view.
