ARCHIVES

BAM ARCHIVES ( 2015 -  )

THREADS, FOLDS & RABBIT HOLES

June 27th - August 28, 2024

Threads, Folds, and Rabbit Holes is a traveling exhibition featuring paintings from Kristy Deetz’s series Holidays Unfolding and Through the Veil.

Threads, Folds & Rabbit Holes features two series of works by Kristy Deetz, an Emerita Professor at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Her Holidays Unfolding series investigates the historic use of decorative drapery and the artistic category of still life. The paintings examine the contradictory feelings that accompany loss or nostalgia and, as a result, become meditations on life’s transience. Deetz says, “I explore new possibilities between a complex interface of painting, textiles, and digital technology, while producing a product that maintains the richness of slow work by hand.”  

Each painting in Deetz’s Through the Veil series begins with a rendering from a closely observed fabric with wrinkles and folds. These works draw upon the structures of art by artists from both the past and the present. The artist says, “The fabric in these paintings acts as a limen or threshold that places the viewer into multiple, often conflicting, layers of space and meaning.” Deetz’s paintings good-humoredly deconstruct imagery from pop, outsider, and high culture to create new “spaces” of meaning. A shape-shifting rabbit recurs throughout the artworks, moving between images and spaces.  

 Along with writer/scholar, Edward Risden, whose pen name is Edward Louis), Deetz has published the books The Singular Adventures of Rabbit and Kitty Boy and Holidays Unfolding: The Continuing Adventures of Rabbit and Kitty Boy. Risden creates stories in response to Deetz’s paintings. They two enjoy presenting their books together.