Photo by Rachel Topham Photography
Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices
April 3 – June 21, 2025
Simranpreet Kaur Anand, Barbara Astman, Maya Beaudry, Dana Claxton, Liz Ikiriko, Jayce Salloum, Michaëlle Sergile, Michelle Sound, Lan “Florence” Yee
Co-curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Capture Photography Festival, and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator, Capture Photography Festival
Opening Reception April 1, 7 – 9 PM RSVP
In-Person Exhibition Tour April 5, 1 – 1:45 PM RSVP
Artist Talk April 15, 6:30 – 7:30 PM RSVP
In this activation of Capture Photography Festival’s Featured Exhibition, Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices, three of the nine artists included in this exhibition – Maya Beaudry, Dana Claxton, and Michelle Sound – are in conversation with Capture Photography Festival’s Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator. This moderated discussion will touch upon the incorporation of textiles in lens-based works and the social and personal commentaries they provide.
Photography and textiles are ubiquitous; we continuously add to our personal diary of photographs on our smart phones and are wrapped in and clothed by fabric. This exhibition explores the intrinsic relationship between textiles and photography. Photography, with its many uses for personal snapshots, evidence, surveillance, advertising, storytelling, and art, is a relatively new medium. Textiles have traditionally been dismissed as craft in part because of the gendered norms embedded within these historically domestic practices, which include sewing, beading, embroidery, knitting, lacemaking, weaving, and dyeing. Although obvious distinctions exist, there are many threads of connection between the materials and processes used in the two mediums: the natural and synthetic fibres that compose paper and thread and the chemical process of creating a photograph or dyeing fabric.
The artists in this exhibition proudly collapse the divisions and hierarchies of these two mediums to reclaim and integrate methods of image-making into their critical practices, forming new approaches to lens-based and textile art forms. Including emerging and established artists, the artworks in this exhibition explore ritual, memory, aesthetic inheritance, technology, immigration, and colonial and embodied archives. In a cultural landscape that continues to become more and more digitized, their work asks what it means to create images that evoke the desire to touch and feel? By disrupting traditions that limit experimentation, the unexpected methods and hybridity of approaches chart new territories of what is possible in today’s overwhelmingly saturated image culture.