Hanover Creative, new gallery in Trenton, shows striking works by five textile artists

Tamara Torres’ “Sueños con las Nubes” is part of the “Fiber Politic” exhibition at Hanover Creative in Trenton.

It takes courage to open a new gallery with an exhibition of experimental textiles. It is particularly gutsy to do it in a city that isn’t known for independent galleries. Trenton has long been a place with many talented artists but few good places to show.

Hanover Creative isn’t going to solve that problem by itself. But the bright, pretty gallery a block and a half east of Mercer County Community College is a confident step in the right direction for the capital of the Garden State. Curator Áine Mickey is from the area, and her experience assembling art shows at Trenton’s BSB Gallery has earned her the trust of the creative community. For “Fiber Politic,” Hanover Creative’s debut show, she has attracted a quintet of audacious textile artists who have shown — and earned acclaim — in the greater Jersey area.

The exhibition, which opened on March 21 and can be seen through April 25, is uneven, but it is also exciting, and it augurs well for the future of the space. (There will be a closing party and artist talk, April 25 at 3 p.m.)

A subtle show it is not, nor is any of it difficult to understand. Even the more abstract pieces wear their signification proudly. Then there are the artists who seem to have picked up needles to make a particular point.

“Love,” by Patricia Dahlman.

Patricia Dahlman’s “Love,” for instance, is a stitched image of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on a square cut-out of canvas. The little dashes of blue, black and brown thread are tiny vectors radiating from his open mouth. They are a blunt but effective visual metaphor for the range and force of his oratory. Sure enough, she has filled every available inch of air around King with his words. MLK is a broadcaster radiant with a message of radical inclusion, and Dalhman, in tiny lines, gets at his self-possession and sense of mission.

Thread connects, Dahlman realizes, but needles are sharp. The act of driving one, hundreds of times, into a permeable surface suggests that the person doing the sewing has an urgent need to make an impression — and perhaps an intervention, too. That corrective drive may help explain Woolpunk’s ongoing need to bend the confrontational message on MAGA hats to her own will. “Fiber Politic” contains a collection of her thread-altered red caps, some with the original lettering torn out, all altered in some manner meant to push back against the President’s agenda. In one of the liveliest (although they’re all pretty lively), Woolpunk encourages us to Make America Grant Asylum. Above the pirated slogan, she has stitched in a heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow and a statement of solidarity with refugees. Like Dahlman’s MLK, she is counting on love to be the last word in any dispute.

So much we might expect from a politically engaged artist who has organized multiple stitch-ins to generate handmade blankets for the homeless. Like several other artists in “Fiber Politic,” Woolpunk doesn’t bother to tie up every loose end. There is no time for that. Problems need to be addressed, and that address has to happen immediately. The unruly stitching on the MAGA hats is meant to be a contrast to their machine-pressed conformity; in this way, she is something like a graffiti artist working with colored fibers rather than spray paint.

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Woolpunk’s bed, at Hanover Creative.

That same provocation is present in one of this show’s centerpieces: a bed made of repurposed fabrics, laid out in the middle of the gallery floor. The piece is a patchwork of old sheets, some with lace patterns, some with doily-like designs and long and wavering tassels, others solid and worn with floral designs, or with textile representations of bowls of lemons. It is, quite literally, homespun. It is as if Woolpunk and her associates raided an old relative’s closet in the country, took the most careworn stuff, cut it up and reassembled it in the general shape of a bedspread. It hums with comfort. It even looks like an inviting place to spend a night. At the same time, it speaks clearly of dislocation, and transience, and the desperate resourcefulness of refugee camps foreign and domestic.

The brash, revelatory wall-hung work of Tamara Torres isn’t quite as literal, but it carries the ragged energy of Woolpunk’s sculptures even further. “Sueños con las Nubes” (see at top of post) wraps bands of torn and fraying canvas around the slats of a frame that suggests the skeleton of a stripped beach chair. She has painted these strips blue and white, bunched them up at the top of the piece, and let narrow strands dangle and knot themselves up toward the bottom. The entire sculpture has the general appearance of a trailer window that has had a close encounter with a tornado but, strangely, it possesses beauty and survivor’s dignity in equal measure.

Its neighbor on the wall is even wilder: a storm of thick textile strips that hang in long, loose shapes like the curtains at a car wash. Torres dares the viewer to assemble a coherent picture out of this shredded canvas. Yet the horizontal panels sutured together with rivets at the top of the piece definitely contain a representational image: a long line of dark human bodies, spectral and slim, on the move with no place to rest.

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Krystle Lemonias’ “De Gray Kingbirdde.”

Torres’ pieces remind us that no form of expression accommodates the Garden State ragpicker’s aesthetic better than fiber art. If you are intrigued by creative amalgamations of materials that you might expect a street sweeper to pick up — and many good Jersey artists are — a local textile show is a good place to go. Krystle Lemonias’ “De Gray Kingbirdde,” a dignified portrait of a flycatcher on a branch, makes good use of the contents of the junkyard. Scraps of trash have been woven into the piece so deftly that you may not even notice them at first. Give yourself protracted exposure, and you’ll see potato sacks, old advertisements, the plastic mesh of an onion bag, and even a few strategic snips from a diaper. The fabric she uses has the whiff of the lost-and-found about it. Thread is unraveling everywhere.

Still, it all hangs together beautifully, and it makes a few convincing statements. First, it forces us to recognize that the Gray Kingbird, like many other New Jersey animals, is presently besieged by human-made trash. The habitat of this bright-eyed creature is threatened by the haphazard way we live. Lemonias is asking us to be mindful of the bird and examine our behavior. She is also making a case for the material itself, and demonstrating that adaptive reuse of the stuff we pitch into the rubbish is possible. If she can make a handsome picture out of shredded plastic sacks and scraps from grocery boxes, it isn’t true that these objects have nothing left to give. The artist is daring us to find worth in things (and beings) discarded.

Kwesi O. Kwarteng’s “Friendly Voice.”

Kwesi O. Kwarteng would probably agree. The methods of the Ghana-born, Newark-based textile artist aren’t altogether different from the ones that Lemonias employed to create “De Gray Kingbirdde” or, for that matter, the ones that Woolpunk used to make her bed. He takes sheets of disparate fabrics, some of them obviously old, thin and ready to rip, and pulls them toward something that resembles unity. He proceeds with utter defiance toward pattern and textile clashes, putting flower prints next to arrows next to stripes, and shags and piles appropriate to rugs alongside bolts as thin as scarves. Yet there is nothing rough about his handling. Somehow, everything harmonizes.

In part, Kwarteng does it by getting his canvases to resemble landscapes. In the gorgeous “Friendly Voice,” he pulls a hand-dyed yellow sheet over the top of a panel and a similar brown-dyed sheet over the bottom. The colors speak of the natural world: soil, midday heat, weathered stone. The impression of the outdoors is amplified by Kwarteng’s decision to gently wrinkle his textiles in a manner that could be called topographic. We could be looking at ridges and long hills from 30,000 feet. A long, sinuous tributary of stitches runs through this field of yellow before finding its terminus in a river-like area, right at eye level, composed of varied fabrics side by side.

It almost feels unnecessary to report that each represents textile traditions in a different nation. We are all, “Friendly Voice” assures us, under the same sun. It is a broadly optimistic vision in the midst of a generally optimistic show — one that insists that we have got the string to hold our disparate world and our beleaguered cities together. All we need to do is keep our points sharp, and hang on to the thread.

Hanover Creative will present “Fiber Politic” through April 25; visit hanovercreates.com.

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