Is the world like a blanket that you wrap around your body- comforting, moldable? Is it like a ruler, sharp-edged and inflexible, meant to see how you measure up? How can we come to understand our bodies as the site for this dual identity, both hard and soft- flexible and resilient- against the pressures of our myriad lived experiences? We love, labor, adapt, negotiate, strike out, and embrace within this flux.
 
Margaret Borah and Amy Faris brings a material presence to these ponderings. Their layered and built pieces fill our eyes with small movements that become big swells, and take us to familiar yet unexpected places. In Borah’s Skin and Potential Body, yarn becomes a stand-in for the female form, as it unravels and stretches to carry the weight of society’s ideals. The confrontational Knife takes up space, and has a dual playful/dangerous quality, depending on your view as either the wielder or the target.
 
Faris’ work centers on what she calls “labored material application.” Her pencil marks are small yet cumulative, like the number of breaths it takes to get through a day. Her drawings steadily record the passage of time, and become a manifestation of close attention. In Breast, the markings convene into a familiar symbol of female identity, yet one that becomes unfamiliar through the haze of deconstruction. What is solid and what is not, Faris’ work seems to ask. Of our memories and experiences, what is really real?
 
Through leaps in scale, texture, and solidity, Borah and Faris bring an exacting eye to the indefinite work of bearing witness, knowing when and where to employ precision cuts.

-Mari Elaine Lamp, curator