October 4 - November 23, 2024
Rose Colored Glasses is an exhibition featuring two Oklahoma based fiber artists, Kendall Ross and Taryn Singleton on view at 108|Contemporary October 4 – November 23, 2024. Ross and Singleton create functional fine art using traditional crafts such as knitting, quilting, sewing, and embroidery. Ross creates text-based work that explores feelings of insecurity and confusion when reality doesn’t match societal expectations or aspirations while Singleton uses a variety of mediums to explore feelings of anxiety and frustration as systemic problems with seemingly clear solutions continue to plague us. Through the forms of traditionally woman dominated crafts both artists navigate the challenges of existing in, and pushing back against, a world where the deck feels stacked against so many.
Artist Talks:
Taryn Singleton Artist Talk, Thursday, October 17, 2024 at 5:30 pm
Kendall Ross Artist Talk, Thursday, October 24, 2024 at 5:30 pm
Taryn Singleton is interested in the persistence of unequal power dynamics and systemic inequality. She explores these concepts through her fine art and through the process of making everyday functional art objects such as clothing, blankets, and bags.
In her fine art practice she works non-objectively, inventing characters and landscape spaces in paint, fiber, and mixed media. She then navigates these spaces using observation, abstraction, line, shape, pattern, color and the cultivation of accidents. Characters take on lives of their own and move in and out from their surroundings and one another. The meaning(s) of these works are not set and up to the interpretation of the viewer.
In her practice of making everyday functional art objects she is exploring how to live in a way that feels more ethical and sustainable within the larger context of the often unethical and unsustainable system of capitalism that is the undercurrent affecting the available individual choices within our society. She knows she can not individually make an impact on things like racism, misogyny, zealotry, poverty, and climate change but through the practice of slow, intentional, making she seeks to be part of a community working towards collective action and change. Through both practices, making is used as a form of resistance and an agent of change.
Kendall Ross Photo by: Rita Taylor, Banff Centre 2024
Kendall Ross, aka “I’d Knit That” is an Oklahoma City based fiber artist. She is best known for hand-knitting colorful, wearable and sculptural art pieces. She uses intricate hand-knitting colorwork methods like intarsia and fair isle to illustrate images and incorporate her original texts into the fabric of her work.
Kendall gravitated toward fiber art throughout her childhood, learning to crochet from her maternal grandmother. The close relationships she built with women in her family through knitting and crochet inspired her interest in women’s history. Kendall earned a BA in American history from Pepperdine University where she researched racial divides between Black and white women’s knitting movements in World War I. Her background as a historian inspires the content and the purpose behind her art.
In her day-to-day practice, the action of hand-knitting is how Kendall processes her emotions, experiences, and memories. She is inspired by the exercise of using a historically woman dominated skill to communicate her personal narrative of being a modern young woman. Kendall is drawn to telling unapologetically intimate, complicated stories of feminine, overlooked moments in her life, putting private emotions on display for people to wear on their chest in their public lives.
This project is sponsored in part by Walter & Associates.
SHOP 108 for available exhibition artwork here
Workshops:
Embroidery Workshop Series with Taryn Singleton
Wednesday, October 23, 2024 and Wednesday, October 30, 2024
7:00 – 9:00 pm
$80 – includes materials
Tickets here
Knitting Workshop with Kendall Ross
Friday, November 8, 2024
6:30 – 9:00 pm
$50 – includes materials
Tickets here