"The tableaux I create are inspired by relationships. Searching for that odd thing, the Feminist Beauty Queen, I mix subversion with flirtation, humor with power, and intimacy with frivolity. I start with vintage and printed fabrics, updating the original purpose while honoring the labors of the past. The fabric becomes the foundation for a surreal, fantastical exploration. By hand, with a mostly dotted line, I stitch figures into dream-like mythological narratives. The juxtaposition of vintage feminine and contemporary feminism is a rich contrast that gives the work much of its unique strength, complexity and frank vulnerability. The actors are present in the way a child perceives the world, wholehearted, engaged, uninhibited and reliant on the senses.
My work consists of a host of characters, primarily female protagonists with a sprinkle of their male consorts. The Goddess-like heroines inhabit a domestic space of agency as they appear in varying sizes and hierarchies playing out their power struggles with the language of visual symbolism, surrealism and ripe with art history references. My scenes are dream-like and live within a fantasy world rooted in the domestic with romanticism sewn in with a pastel pallet and veiled overlapping images that ooze emotional moments. Each stitch points to the next in a slow lingering line that ask the viewer to take their time looking. The characters often live in limbo between a public and private realm, simultaneously acting as subject and object and leading with broad emotional issues like rejection, notions of value, power plays within social dynamics, love, fear, desire, isolation, and finding beauty within the mundane. Changes in the tenor of cultural expression between then and now, and in conflating today’s brand of cultural confessionalism with yesteryear’s saccharin conservatism, the work encapsulates a sweeping arc of feminist storytelling."
-Orly Cogan