Warp and Weft
at Satellite Art Show
June 19-23, 2024
81 Leonard Gallery is pleased to present Warp and Weft, a duo exhibition of New York-based artists Abby Cheney and Rochelle Voyles at Satellite Art Show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Cheney’s architectural paper pulp sculptures and Voyles’ 2D and 3D cut-paper collages find their foundations in the language of textiles, which offers structure and pattern as both a reliable guide and departure point for investigations into the material, personal, and societal. Within each artist’s distinct relationship to textiles and craft are notions of the domestic interrupted and abstraction as agency.
Central to Abby Cheney’s process of building sculpture from soft materials is the criss-crossing of elements to create structure and stability. Essentially weaving with cardboard before sculpting the surface with paper pulp, Cheney achieves forms that lean, slouch, and bend, subverting their own rigidity with evidence of their once-softness. Soft Drum incorporates weaving with actual fabric into its belly-like cavity, making the sculpture simultaneously a weaving and a loom. Gauze snakes through space, creating a semi-permeable boundary for the fair booth. Windows of negative space created by the latticework offer various perspectives inward to the fair and to Rochelle Voyles’ work across from it, sparking a dialogue with the linework and negative space within Voyles’ looping sculptures and paper collages.
Voyles derives the forms in her work from fiber diagrams and patterns, many of which are sourced from books belonging to familial matriarchs. The artist finds comfort in their instructive nature, using the diagrams and patterns as the starting point in work that navigates turmoil, chaos, and contradiction. Self-Replicating Fear and Fabric of Time grapple with anxiety and fear, considering various methods of coping. In Self-Replicating Fear, the replication cycle of anxiety is mirrored in the repetitive crochet patterns and nightmarish images of horror and pain collaged on the surface. Fabric of Time, inspired by embroidery patterns, presents a visual unraveling and more peaceful view of reality, including images of nature and the built environment weathered by time.
In weaving, the warp is stretched first to build tension for the weft, which carries almost none. Rochelle Voyles’ and Abby Cheney’s works hold this contradiction between strong and soft, structure and freedom, tension and slack.
Abby Cheney is an artist and educator from Baltimore, MD, currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Her interdisciplinary practice investigates how we use emotion and memory to assign value to objects and spaces regardless of material worth. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2018, and her BA in Studio Art and English from Kenyon College in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at a variety of spaces and institutions, including Flux Factory, 601artspace, Chashama Space to Present, Pierogi’s The Boiler and SPRING/BREAK Art Fair. She has held residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Trestle Art Space, Vermont Studio Center and Byrdcliffe Artists Colony. She works as a Teaching Artist with Studio in a School in elementary schools throughout NYC.
Rochelle Voyles (b. 1989, Toledo, Ohio) is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist who works in hand cut collage and paint. She dislocates, interrupts, and re-purposes found images in order to decipher her experience of reality and our collective relationship to photographs. She received her BFA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from Pratt Institute in 2012. She was a 2023 resident at The Peter Bullough Foundation Residency in Winchester, VA, a 2022 resident at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and a 2021 resident at the ChaNorth ChaShama Artist Residency. She has shown at galleries in New York including Trestle Gallery, Peninsula Art Space, The Local Project, and Collarworks.
Fair hours & info here
Images at top:
left: Abby Cheney, Taper, 2024,Cardboard, paper pulp, acrylic; 20 x 7 x 7 in.
right: Rochelle Voyles, Soft Spring, 2021, Paper collage, 8 x 7.5 in.
