Margo Wolowiec

Catching Thread, October 2013

This October, Grizzly Grizzly invites you to check your data stream at the door of Margo Wolowiec's solo exhibition 'Catching Thread'. No wait – literally, check it! What you are about to see are woven versions of the endless onslaught of twitter feeds, Instagram posts, and Facebook updates. You might not recognize them right away, but your data could be hidden in her warps and wefts.

Wolowiec sources the never-ceasing stream of data to fix in the still matrix of her woven works. In One Day of Status Updates: 9.15.09, the process of weaving, unweaving, and reweaving blurs the transcribed text into a barely legible gray sphere, a record of a day's feelings but hardly accessible. As our day-to-day conversations are increasingly truncated, Wolowiec's materialization of these texts carries a curious weight.

'Catching Thread' will also include video works by Wolowiec; in fact, the exhibition's title is a nod to Richard Serra's film Catching Lead. In the 2011 video 10 tries at a square, Wolowiec shows us a blank white surface, her hand darting in and out of the frame as she attempts to "draw" a square with a piece of black thread ten times – with absolutely no success whatsoever. The happenstance drawings, byproducts of her intended task, are humbly beautiful, as they are drawn then swiped away.

Artist Bio

Margo Wolowiec, originally from Detroit, Michigan, currently lives and works in San Francisco. Her work often resides between mediums, using material processes and concerns as a way to activate archives of history, memory and nostalgia. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts, and has shown work at The Center for Performance Research, (Brooklyn, NY), Brooklyn Arts Center (Brooklyn, NY), Root Division, (San Francisco), and Uri Gallery, (Seoul, South Korea). She also co-directed Janus Project, an alternative gallery space in Brooklyn, NY.