Jessica Rankin at the project

Thanks to the efforts of numerous artists since the 1970s, the esthetic hierarchy that once dismissed embroidery as mere "craft" or "women's work" has gradually been dismantled. Perhaps reflecting this increased acceptance, Jessica Rankin produces needlework that eschews an overt address of gender. In her first New York solo show, Rankin presented four large works (all 2004) that only vaguely invoke the historical ties between embroidery and domesticated femininity. Her principal accomplishment is an expansion of the medium's formal and conceptual range.

As have countless women before her, Rankin embroiders both text and imagery onto fabric. But quite unlike her predecessors, she first sews multiple swatches of organdy into mural-size squares and rectangles. Left unstretched and pinned a few inches from the wall, the organdy hangs like colored mist--pale, transparent and barely there. These ethereal supports are fitting grounds for Rankin's nimble needlework, which posits a disembodied consciousness floating through time and space.

In Nocturne, for example, several panels of indigo organdy form a large square that evokes the night sky. The upper-left corner is embroidered with yellow stars, many of which are linked by stitches to define constellations. Elsewhere, we witness fluid arabesques that suggest currents of wind or water and a grove of green trees, their leaves knotted into high relief. The entire maplike scene is woven with fragments of black text. Some of Rankin's words describe geography while others offer poetic phrases like "THIS FINE MESH OF MEMORIES AND PRESENCE." By allowing the stitches to overlap and intersect, Rankin often frustrates their legibility. But this tangle of words and imagery also plots elliptical movements of the mind, quickly shifting from external observation to internal reflection and back again.

Similar streams of consciousness are stitched through the other works in the show, including Signal to Noise, which replaces natural forms with intimations of architecture and technology. Several black buildings are spread across an expanse of blue and white organdy and appear connected by vinelike lines. This visual shorthand for communication is echoed throughout the embroidered text, part of which reads, "FOR FOUR STRAIGHT DAYS SHE LET OUT A CONSTANT STREAM OF WORDS." This and other references to excessive speech may resonate with the history of Rankin's medium, reminding us that embroidery was once regarded as a quiet activity appropriate for young ladies. But Rankin's verbose work tends to resist silence. Her episodic embroidery on the sheerest of supports conjures a liberated subject--one that seeks (we repeatedly read) "AN ENDLESS RELEASE OF LANGUAGE."

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