Luke Haynes’s Clothes Portrait series is self-limited by the palette of the clothing worn by the subjects. Similarly, the soldiers’ quilts made primarily by British military men are dependent upon the wool serge or woven worsted twill recycled from uniforms. These quilts are highly geometric, in part because of the weight of the fabrics, and also because the mathematical precision was appealing to the makers. This type of quilt, often associated with the Crimean War years and with British conflicts in India, is sometimes called a “convalescent quilt” because it was a therapeutic activity recommended to occupy soldiers recovering from wounds or sickness.

Camouflage contrasts footage from an industrial textile manufacturing film that shows how fabric is made, dyed, and processed at the Bradford Dyeing Association in Rhode Island, with another film titled Shadows, Shadows, Everywhere (1972), in which children learn about shadows and how to make them. Bradford Dyeing was in operation before the Civil War but closed in 2011 after years of labor abuses and heavy fines for dumping chemical waste. The mill had been a top supplier of camouflage to the United States military. The film falsely paints a picture of happy and productive workers, itself a kind of camouflage. The second film shows two children making shadow puppets in front of a piece of cloth and going outside to look at shadows created by the sun. In combining the two films Sabrina Gschwandtner wanted to “bring out the shadowy aspects of the textile mill film, and to represent this idea of ‘camouflage’ in multiple ways. It’s also an acknowledgement that whenever you shed light on something, you also make a shadow.”

In 1942, neuroscientist Charles Sherrington lyrically described the reawakening of the brain after deep sleep: “It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.” In 2012, Gschwandtner stitched footage from The Enchanted Loom, a 1974 film titled after Sherrington’s metaphor, to her own footage shot from her window during an artist residency at Wave Hill, in the Bronx.

In his Iconography series, Luke Haynes comments on seminal American figures from the past and present, and on the nature of fame. This work features superimposed images of Kanye West and Jay Z, resulting in a combined portrait that expresses the musicians both as individuals and the faces of the hip-hop scene. Based upon C-prints by Troy Gua from his Pop-Hybrid series, it further extends the idea of stardom as branding and commoditization. Haynes relies upon the musicians’ rise to fame and the use of reclaimed textiles to create an artwork that relates a “rags to riches” narrative. He sees it as an encounter between urban graffiti and the art of quiltmaking, both in visual terms and in the relative investment of time. Whereas a spray paint portrait might yield immediate results, this work took the artist six months to make and comprises one million quilting stitches (as counted by his machine). Its epic scale is also reflective of a milestone in his own artmaking history: it is his 101st quilt.