"It's all about understanding that nothing is permanent," says Elise Deringer, of her latest solo exhibition, Perception & Passage, opens tonight in the Harry Wood Gallery at ASU.
Deringer's handmade filters and containers (from silk and cotton nets) dangle from the gallery's ceiling and walls. They're filled and embedded with sand, salts, stones, and concrete that occassionally slip through the gaps in the fiber.
"There's a rustling almost," says Deringer. "A little bit of a struggle in really quiet way."
Deringer says her piece titled Metamorphoses is the best example of this struggle. It's also her favorite piece in the show.
Detail, Metamorphoses (a shift from one to another). Courtesy of Elise Deringer.
Metamorphoses (a shift from one to another) is a series of silk tubes filled with reclaimed sand that hang from the ceiling at Harry Wood. The pattern on the silk tubes is a cyanotype print she made with a photographic process that uses sunlight to develop an image on a surface.
Deringer let sand sift through the fabric as it developed for 11 minutes to create the blue-and-white pattern. She then sowed the pieces of silk and filled them with sand.
She says she chose her fabric medium because of the linked relationships people have with time and with fiber.
"You're born and you're wrapped in cloth," she says. "Then you die and you're wrapped in cloth. There are very few moments in your life in between that you're not engaging with the cloth in some way."
Deringer, who graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a Bachelor in Fine Arts in sculpture, started using fibers in 2008.
Cast nets. Silk, sand. Courtesy of Elise Deringer.
"I feel like my relationship with the arts and with making in general is for myself to work through things I'm trying to understand," she says. "Things that don't have a simple or clear answer."
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The opening reception for Perception & Passage is at 6 p.m. on September 6 at the Harry Wood Gallery at ASU's School of Art building in Tempe. The exhibition is free and open to the public and will be open until September 16.
For more information, visit the event page.
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