China Marks at Luise Ross

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Jessica Ostrower

China Marks began using a sewing machine to make her artwork only three years ago, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the 14 intricate pieces on view here. In her earlier work, the artist, who is in her early 60s, concentrated on drawings of figures in disturbing scenarios. Her new work, more surreal in nature, casts a wide referential net, from the patched-together playfulness of Gladys Nilsson's watercolors to the ornamental complexity of 16th-century tapestries. For her first solo exhibition in New York, the artist showed just how evocative and beautiful textiles can be.

Marks calls her collaged fabric works "sewn drawings." Using an industrial zigzag sewing machine, she affixes scraps of often eccentrically patterned material to cloth backgrounds ranging from about 2 to 5 feet in height. Marks handles the machine with crafty expertise, drawing with stitches to render shading or the outlines of forms. Chance is an important element in Marks's process as well. As in the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, the unrelated segments create disjunctive, dreamlike scenes and unexpected narratives.

One of my favorites, Storybook Days (2003), appears at first to be a simple pastoral scene peopled by harmless creatures; but upon closer examination, disturbing Brueghelesque episodes emerge: a tawny cat grips a bloody rabbit's head in its mouth; a thought bubble illustrates another bunny's daydream of fornicating with a Vargas girl on a bearskin rug; a green military tank invades the picture from the right. Patience definitely pays off when viewing these lively, colorful works.

Winter in China (2002) is a particularly good example of the cobbled-together cohesion found in Marks's textiles. Chairman Mao's head floats amid a sky of chintz patterns, while a frosty field of white wolves and owls at the bottom edge signifies snow (the "winter" of the title). The Sea Fairy (2003) is another fantastical scene--atop a roiling sea of purple waves, a boat carries a paisley eaglelike creature that reaches a monstrous hand up toward a Klimtian fairy fluttering by in the green sky above. Marks's imaginative, spontaneous process results in sometimes bizarre, always exciting work.