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In the art of Lia Cook, textile tells its own stories. Her work uses the physical properties of fabric to suggest its intangible qualities, often in contrasting or paradoxical ways. She has woven drapery studies that revel in the fluidity of hanging cloth, but these weavings themselves are rigorously pressed and flattened. The pictured drapery is intended to cover, yet it also reveals: behind those obscuring folds of fabric are glimpses of bare skin and boudoirs.
Cook borrows details of drapery from Renaissance paintings, focusing on this simplest aspect of clothing; yet the images are rendered in a manner suggestive of computer pixels or the striations of a video screen. And while her work hangs on museum walls and concerns the art of painting as much as the craft of weaving, her subject matter challenges high-art notions with its emphasis on domesticity and humble references to dish towels, netting, bedsheets and curtains.
A survey of her work, "Lia Cook: Material Allusions," presented by the Oakland Museum of California (October 21, 1995-January 7) and now touring, is both a document of an artist's development and an autobiography of fabric. Organized by Inez Brooks-Myers, curator of costume and textiles at the museum, the exhibition--particularly an installation composed of six "paintings" of drapery, framed by actual ceiling-to-floor jacquard draperies--conveys the layer upon layer of meaning woven through our perception of textiles. It's as if Cook had constructed a very clever mystery novel full of surprising revelations that gradually change the reader's assumptions about the characters.
"What I find intriguing about Lia's work is that it draws upon the history of fine art as well as women's history and the history of textiles," says Brooks-Myers. "She may evoke an image of a small bit of textile found in a Florentine fresco, and focus our attention on it by increasing its scale and making it monumental so we are aware of its importance to her. We have an intellectual statement we can all appreciate visually."
The earliest of the 25 pieces in the show explore how fabric may assume many guises. For example, Hanging Net, 1984 a length of loosely woven painted rayon, becomes sculptural simply by being hung, like a towel, from a single point on the wall. Through...