Bedspreads and tablecloths your grandmother might have owned are embroidered with nudes, some in sexual positions, in Orly Cogan’s show at Carl Hammer. The exhibit is provocative–sort of grannies gone wild–with Cogan using her own family and their relationships to get at universal truths.
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Her colorful figures are made with running stitches–they’re like sketches that become part of the original prints and patterns, like contingent thoughts. The repeated figures on the tablecloth in Tangled Up in You include her and her boyfriend; she’s both an adult woman smiling at him and Cinderella sitting on his shoulder, and the picket fence around the edge adds a touch of domesticity. Allegory shows multiple female nudes, including one touching another’s genitals, and a group clustered around the lone male–“symbolically blinding him with their feminine wiles,” says Cogan. Sometimes the same woman is seen in different poses, affectionate in one, standoffish in another.
During art school in Baltimore and New York City, Cogan made abstract collages and surrealist-inspired paintings, work that in time became “more emotional, with more psychology behind it.” She graduated in 1994 and later took a one-day class in embellishing quilts. “I did a little naked female in my embellished quilt square,” she says, “and the old women in my class were tickled pink.” Clothing, she says, suggests occupation and class, but nudity universalizes.
When: Through 7/8
