Interfacing with Missed Connections
Interfacing with Missed Connections
Artworks Center for Contemporary Art
310 North Railroad Avenue, Loveland, CO 80537
June 11-July 31, 2021
Admission: Free
Review by Madeleine Boyson
It’s difficult to ignore the contacts that make a gallery visit possible when writing an exhibition review that’s about human connection. The emails back and forth to confirm a visit, the greetings at the front door, the informal (often unguarded) discussions about art and its nuances—each exchange I have underpins the themes behind Interfacing with Missed Connections.
This group exhibition, currently on view at Artworks Center for Contemporary Art in Loveland until July 31, features work by Tiffany Danielle Elliott, May Kytonen, Cicelia Ross-Gotta, and Connor Walden. By coupling textiles with technology, Interfacing brings tangibility back to our increasingly digital interactions. Most notably, the exhibition reminds viewers that human contact is thickly layered with meaning and identity, and that we inevitably work through the histories of our own missed connections in all of our most vulnerable communications.
The five works in Interfacing are intriguing, yet unobtrusive, and each commands a large portion of the space. This is by design, Ross-Gotta and Walden tell me as they escort me through the room. They hope that viewers will feel unrushed and free to repair old connections by spending time with the works, and I find that each piece dazzles more the longer we discuss it together. [1]
Connor Walden, Security Blankets, 2020, wool yarn, 18 x 18 inches each. Image by The Milkshake Club.
A detail image of Connor Walden, Security Blankets, 2020, wool yarn, 18 x 18 inches each. Image by The Milkshake Club.
Walden plays with thematic digital/analog layering in Security Blankets, which comprises three square, knitted blankets displaying the first Creation story from the Christian Old Testament and Jewish Torah in binary code. The pink stitches represent zeros and the blues are ones, fabricating a textured pattern that reads like a foreign language. The code also reflects the endless transcriptions required to print classical manuscripts in modern English, which points to the problems inherent in translation and the repeated opportunities for misinterpretation. This piece questions how Christians have used the Creation narrative as security for their systematized beliefs, and if they’ve missed the point of foundational sacred texts.
May Kytonen also relies on hi-tech code to decipher communication in I think we might be half sisters. Here Kytonen addresses the unique vulnerability of trying to construct a relationship out of nothing but test results and digital algorithms. Half sisters is a scrapbook made with medical gauze and opened to a cross-stitched page with shared 23andMe DNA results. The work “...becomes a substitution for shared family photos, the only snapshot of me and my older sister together,” writes Kytonen. [2] The clinical feel of the book atop a lectern elicits a queasy anxiety about whether or not the connection is too late, even as the Internet has provided an unlikely site for healing. Ultimately, the work asks: how do we reconcile missing pieces of ourselves while we attempt to connect with others?
Cicelia Ross-Gotta, What To Keep What To Toss What To Give Away, 2021, felt, thread, used desk chair, QR code/poem, and the artist’s father’s backpack, 36 x 22 x 22 inches. Images by The Milkshake Club.
Yet there is hope embedded in Kytonen’s scrapbook, a raw eagerness also reflected in Ross-Gotta’s What To Keep What To Toss What To Give Away. The latter features a handful of stitched felt smartphones, charging cords, and a tablet in the artist’s late father’s backpack on a used office chair. Visitors are encouraged to rifle through the pack and handle the detailed objects, mimicking the act of sorting through a person’s belongings after they have passed.
In the gallery, Ross-Gotta, Walden, and I chuckle about the exhibition’s title and the original “missed connections” it alludes to: personal ads made popular on Craigslist in which a person attempts to find or contact someone they’ve met, but otherwise could not connect with. Ross-Gotta notes the romantic hopefulness of the ads, and this wishfulness is mirrored in What To Keep. Even the QR-coded poem inside the backpack shows her persistence in looking for connection with her father after all hope is gone and grief has settled in.
A detail image of Connor Walden’s Wing Semaphore, 2021, video and embroidery of flag semaphore on found denim shirt (installation in collaboration with Jacob Nordberg and Doug Hatano). Image by The Milkshake Club.
A still from the video component of Connor Walden’s Wing Semaphore, 2021. Image by DARIA.
Similarly, Walden’s second work, Wing Semaphore, addresses hope-filled attempts at connection as well. Where Blankets considers religion broadly, Wing Semaphore (a collaboration with Jacob Nordberg and Doug Hatano) contemplates the individual faith experience through prayer—another form of communication without reliable, wired connection. A denim shirt hangs high on the wall, embroidered with a striking red and yellow Semaphore key, but features wings instead of the traditional flags used to signal messages from boats with malfunctioning radios. Underneath, a video displays the Semaphore in action: Walden knits quietly as celestial wings sign the chorus to ABBA’s SOS and the Hawaiian ho’oponopono prayer at intervals behind him.[3] The messaging centers both the “disintegration” and “integration” of prayer and the ways technology interposes in faith, and the viewer can easily see the traces of frustration and healing in this 21st century invocation.
Tiffany Danielle Elliott, i also knew, i was not Beautiful, 2021. whitework wedding embroidery and acrylic on linen binder sized to decrease the measurements of the artist's body, ribbon, and steel fence post repair bracket. Image by The Milkshake Club.
While Kytonen, Ross-Gotta, and Walden all grapple with interpersonal or supernatural communications between the self and others, Tiffany Danielle Elliott relocates missed connections between the self and the body. I also knew, i was not Beautiful is a stunning whitework wedding embroidery and acrylic on linen binder, hung from a steel fence post repair bracket affixed high to the wall. The piece is simple, as is Elliott’s description, which concedes only that the binder is “sized to decrease the measurements of the artist’s body.” [4]
Subsequently, the work reveals its layers slowly through context clues and visceral feelings. The repair bracket, for instance, grants that posts, like bodies, often need support. Yet the bracket’s tall position subverts its usual placement in the ground and establishes “fixing” the body more like an active forethought to better reflect the self than an afterthought imposed by another person. The binder, completed in a regional style of Southern whitework (as I am told), elicits a physical sensation of tightening that brings the body into contact with generational pasts.
For an exhibition that uses so much technology as inspiration, Interfacing with Missed Connections is remarkably material, as though the artists instinctively understand that (hu)man cannot live on screens alone. The resulting impression is one of vulnerability, a state of being that is made possible by this intersection of the digital, the analog, and a sincere willingness to relate despite previous misinterpretations, miscommunications, or missed connections.
Ross-Gotta asks the visitor to simply “be vulnerable with her” in response to her own openness as an artist, and Walden warmly agrees. [5] And as we stand together in the gallery, having shared vaccination statuses and a thoughtful discussion, it occurs to me that I haven’t seen a maskless stranger smile at me in-person like this for 15 months. This is a connection that I have missed.
Madeleine Boyson is an independent writer, curator, lecturer, and artist located in Denver. Her art and scholarship concentrate on American modernism and (dis)ability studies, including issues of care and dependency as well as the wholeness of the body. In addition to her work as a communications manager, Madeleine volunteers as Development Director for Femme Salée—an online intersectional platform focusing on complex embodiment in the arts. She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History and History from the University of Denver.
[1] From my conversation with Cicelia Ross-Gotta and Connor Walden while touring the exhibition at Artworks in Loveland.
[2] From the exhibition text.
[3] Walden tells me this prayer is the simple yet powerful mantra: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.”
[4] From the exhibition text.
[5] From my conversation with Ross-Gotta and Walden while touring the exhibition.
