1014’s fall season opened with Delirious Disruptions, a solo exhibition by Annette Cords featuring her Jacquard tapestries, works on paper, and digital prints. Through diverse media and approaches, the artist explored the material culture of the city and the layered messages that coexist, amplify, and void each other in the built environment. Curated by Jill Conner.
Exhibition ran from September 6th until October 14th.
Call On Me / Say It Softly, Hand-woven Jacquard tapestry, wool & cotton, 53.5 x 40.5 inches, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
The exhibition’s title, Delirious Disruptions, is inspired by Rem Koolhaas’ book Delirious New York. According to Koolhaas: “The city becomes a mosaic of episodes, each with its own particular life span, that contest each other through the medium of the Grid.” The ever-changing metropolis makes, re-makes, and erases its buildings and culture, becoming a Rosetta Stone of architecture and human behavior.
In her Jacquard Tapestries, Annette Cords uses collage, along with the merging and layering of visual and textual information, as a method for paying attention and discovering unexpected connections. She explores the interrelationship of varied visual-textual languages and how the intersection of multiple voices and viewpoints creates layered messages and metaphors. The tapestries begin with drawings, photographs, and word pairings; elements are added, subtracted, and combined in Photoshop and Illustrator. Cords then brings image files into digital weaving programs where each pixel becomes a stitch, an interlacing of warp and weft. Frequently, the artist takes one weaving file, doubles back, and repeats parts of it, revealing a search for articulation and meaning.
For her show at 1014, Annette Cords developed a series of glyphs inspired by the interior and exterior ironwork of the Beaux-Arts building. The townhouse is about to undergo a re-configuration, a transformation by Chipperfield Architects in 2024. Repurposing the formal elements of the ironwork, Cords created graphic characters that she digitally prints and adheres to the walls. The artist considered how the space can be re-written or written anew while incorporating components from its past.
The installation at 1014 encouraged multiple perspectives and interpretations: the tapestries hang from frames so that the front and the back can be viewed; glyphs and visual elements are placed on the walls and activate the architecture; and the tapestries confer a tangible presence to intertwined words and images. Through the interaction of digital and analog ways of working, Cords linked disparate elements—digital typefaces and drawn forms, visual weave structures and recognizable texts, pixel-based pictures and tactile surfaces. The unexpected juxtapositions and layering invite viewers to look closely and decipher new meanings.
Artist Annette Cords was born in Northern Germany and raised in Hamburg, and lives and works between New York and Hamburg. She received her MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, her practice has evolved to span installation, sculpture, and textiles. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Kunsthalle Dessau (Dessau, Germany), Yeh Art Gallery, St. John's University (NYC), Raft of Sanity (Buffalo), PS122 Gallery (NYC), InLiquid Gallery (Philadelphia), Project:ARTspace (NYC), Kang Contemporary (Berlin), New York Public Library (NYC), Jenaer Kunstverein and Villa Rosenthal (Jena, Germany). Her work has appeared in group shows at venues including the Queens Museum, Flux Factory, The Drawing Center, Kentler International Drawing Space, and Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles. She has been the recipient of grants and residencies, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Open Sessions Residency at The Drawing Center, and a grant from the ArsVersa Kunst-Stiftung.
More Information: annettecords.net
Curator Jill Conner is an art critic based in New York City with a focus on Modern and Contemporary Art. Since 1995 Conner has contributed to publications such as Afterimage, Art in America, Artnet, Art Papers, ArtUS, AS | MAG, Brooklyn Rail, Contemporary Magazine, Flash Art, Interview Magazine, Performance Art Journal, Reflex, Riot Material, Whitehot, and Whitewall. She is the Founder of AS | Artists Studios and a graduate student at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
More information: jillconner.com
Gallery photos taken by Gili Benita
VENUE ACCESSIBILITY
Unfortunately, 1014 Fifth Avenue is in the process of being refurbished, and is not fully accessible in its current state. We apologize to our guests and kindly ask you to contact j.isaacs@1014.nyc if you need further information or assistance. We will do our best to enable everyone to join us.