BRATTLEBORO — An exhibit by the Oregon-based textile artist Jude Danielson will run in the gallery of Epsilon Spires for the months of July and August, with an opening celebration on Friday, July 1, featuring a musical performance by Intangible Shirt Company.
The show, “Unseen Rhythms,” features Danielson's large-scale quilts based on pixelated abstractions of human faces.
“I love faces and landscapes, geometry and rhythms,” Danielson, who spent decades working in various fields of science and mathematics before retiring in 2011, said in a news release. “I use my computer to explore the meeting point between pure color perception and recognizable nature, taking photographs and changing their pixelation to emphasize their pure color design while maintaining their recognizable uniqueness,” she explains.
Danielson has received a bachelor's in biology from Bates College (1958) and master's degrees in wildlife biology (1961) and forestry and botany (1988) from the University of Montana.
Although she has held several interesting positions throughout her long career, including as the first female counselor at the all-male Trapper Creek Job Corps Center of the U.S. Forest Service, Danielson's interest in art has remained constant. She studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s, and she is currently a student in the continuing education program at the Art Department of the University of Oregon.
“One thing that is striking for me is how initially abstracted the pieces are,” says Jamie Mohr, executive director of Epsilon Spires, about the work in “Unseen Rhythms.” “It takes a moment for your mind to translate the pixelated quilt image into a face, sometimes a familiar celebrity face, such as Rachel Maddow or Serena Williams. This process of emergent recognition really draws you into focusing on the work, and then you begin to perceive in more detail how Jude brilliantly constructed each quilt.”
Intangible Shirt Company is a new collaboration between four fixtures of the local underground music scene: Chris Weisman, Nicholas Bisceglia, Omeed Goodarzi, and Elie McAfee-Hahn. Weisman, who has been described as among the “last of the lo-fi rebels,” says in an interview in the music journal Impose that the experience of his songs is like “a warm soothing wind with just a little sand in it,” adding that he is “shooting music strong and steady from my northern outpost, with a bold and conquering spirit.”
The reception for “Unseen Rhythms” is free to attend and begins at 5 p.m., with Intangible Shirt Company performing at 8 p.m. Danielson's quilts will be available for purchase in a silent auction which runs for the duration of her show. Winners will be announced at the closing reception in August. For more information, visit epsilonspires.org.