Antifunction

Antifunction is an exhibition featuring sculptural works by B. Jean Larson and Susan Allred, who have adapted traditional craft techniques, typically used for creating functional objects, to create non-functional artworks that challenge consumer culture and its environmental impact and societal perceptions of women and their labor.

B. Jean reclaims secondhand textiles that previous owners have discarded. They source their materials locally and internationally to create a convergence of place that echo their idea of bogs, which fluctuate between the binaries of land and water. They use these gathered textiles to create large-scale rag rugs that span the divide between painting and sculpture, art and craft. Their modular rag rugs are fluid, changing form to respond to the sites they're placed in, much like domestic textiles whose meaning changes depending on whether they're on a bed or a gallery wall.

Susan Allred transforms quilted fabrics into sculptural forms that at first appear comforting and familiar but are neither. She finds unfinished quilt tops or blocks and commercial textiles, and transforms them with surface design techniques, including deconstructed screen printing, stamping, painting, and various dyeing processes. Her resulting sculptures refer to clay vessels and to women's bodies in form, but their matter challenges the traditional utility of both objects. This contradiction lets Allred explore the physical properties of her materials while she crafts commentary on societal norms imposed on women and the internal metamorphoses that follow when we shed these expectations.

B. Jean Larson and Susan Allred's artistic processes are repetitive and meditative, and as such, they reflect on traditionally undervalued "women's work,"  reimagining labor-intensive crafts that are typically seen as merely decorative or functional. By transforming everyday items like rugs and quilts into non-functional sculptures, they create visually captivating and conceptually profound artworks that challenge the distinction between craft and fine art.

Photos by Summer Raine Young