Unspooling the meaning of “Thread” at El Camino College
We’ve all heard the expression, “hanging on by a thread,” which can refer to one’s job, one’s marriage, or one’s mother-in-law at the hospital. This somewhat ominous use of the word “thread,” since it’s also the title of the current fiber-centric show in the Art Gallery at El Camino College, should be countered with one that’s more uplifting, for example an apt line from The Upanishads: “Thread connects this world with the next and all beings to one another.”
There, that’s better, and certainly more positive. And “Thread,” which has its opening reception from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 8, is a positive and creative show.
Threading the needle
Asked about the exhibition, the gallery’s director and curator Susanna Meiers doesn’t mince words: “Dawn Ertl was the inspiration for the show. I’ve known Dawn for a long time and I highly regard her and her work, and I was very interested to see what we could do together.”
Ertl’s work, in this case an installation comprised of suspended, open-weave, thread panels, has been shown in South Bay galleries over the years. She’s also currently in “Post Waste: Sustainable Art,” on view at South Bay Contemporary in San Pedro.
Meiers and Ertl both suggested artists whom they thought would fit into the scheme of the exhibition, and they ended up with 14 altogether. They’re listed at the bottom of this story.
Ertl recently earned an MFA in sculpture (fiber sculpture) at Cal State Long Beach, but she now lives near Woodland Hills and relies on public transportation. That’s not because she can’t afford a set of wheels, but because she wants to leave a smaller footprint, environmentally speaking. It’s a conviction that extends to her artwork, and that’s what we’re here to talk about.
Years ago, Dawn Ertl attended El Camino College as a film major, but then took a sculpture class with Russell McMillan, “and I became hooked on sculpture because I found you could do anything.” She began with clay, tried her hand at bronze, got into ceramics, got burned out on ceramics, and “started playing around with fiber,” although, she adds, “it didn’t become an important part of my practice until way later.”
From El Camino, Ertl went to Otis College of Art and Design, where she began experimenting with sheets of plastic bags and working them into sculptures and installations. After moving on to Cal State Long Beach she took a weaving course, and the instructor suggested working the plastic bags into the weaving. “So I started playing around with that idea and mixing it with other fibers, and it kind of took off from there.”
More than meets the eye
Ertl’s “Long Term, Short Term, Relationships” is literally the centerpiece of “Thread” in that it sits (well, hangs) in the middle of the gallery. The work, as she described it for the show, “deals specifically with woven depictions of patterns created in weather mapping. This site-variable installation causes the viewer to interact both with the work and with the gallery. Not only does the piece exist within itself but it creates a screen through which the rest of the exhibition can be viewed.”
If that sounds ambitious, it is, so let’s see if we can shed some light on Ertl’s thought processes.
“My main practice as a whole has an umbrella theme of ‘how we treat each other affects the way we treat the environment.’ I try to think about social issues that fit into that realm and go from there.” A work that was shown at the Manhattan Beach Art Center, she points out, “was based on the idea of ‘home,’ and how we think about the home we share with everybody else versus the home that is the place that we come home to, and the different ways that we take care of those places.” As for her piece currently on view in San Pedro, Ertl says that it’s “based on the idea of the United States and the struggle that we go through dealing with how the government sees these issues and how we take them personally — and how we deal with them.” But it should be noted, and this is one more thing that takes Ertl’s work to another level, many of her weavings are based on music notation.
Now, what about the piece in “Thread”?
“The body of work that’s in this show is based on weather pattern data,” Ertl says, “and so (it’s focused on) wind direction and temperature and dew-point and humidity.” A friend of hers created a mathematical program that charts weather data for the continental U.S. “I take the weather points and make a pattern to address the loom with, and then there’s shapes that appear within that pattern that I color in and weave into it, like a floating pattern, and when you stitch it in it disrupts the regular foundation of the weaving and breaks it down.
“It’s like a metaphor for how we exist in our environment. There’s a foundation on this earth which exists perfectly awesome without us, but we kind of mess it up as we go along on our merry little way.” The work conveys the danger and damage, although one’s not likely to, and perhaps not even expected to, grasp all this with just one passing glance.
“I don’t know if you can get that when you’re looking at it,” Ertl admits, “but it’s what I go through when I’m doing a process, and I hope by the way that the weather patterns are displayed that you’ll see something that you can relate to.”
Lastly, she wants to emphasize one more thing about her work:
“It also deals with the idea of weather and climate change, and the misconception about what climate change is, the culmination and averaging out of weather data.” In her work, Ertl is dealing with a specific and limited time frame with regard to the weather. “But the whole thing would be the climate,” she emphasizes. “I think that’s an important thing to think about.”
Now that you’ve heard all that, you’ll give “Long Term, Short Term, Relationships” a few moments more of your time. It might be more than you bargained for, but it should be worth it.
Thread, now on view in the El Camino College Art Gallery, 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance, has a reception for the artists from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 8. These artists include Edith Abeyta, Susan Connell, Raoul De la Sota, Kiyomi Fukui, Betsy Lohrer Hall, Chuck Hohng, Peter Liashkov, Tina Linville, Victoria May, Laurel Paley, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Lisa Solomon, and Ruth Katzenstein Souza. An artists’ talk is scheduled for 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 13. Hours, Monday and Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., plus Wednesday and Thursday from 2 to 8 p.m. Through Sept. 22. Call (310) 660-3010 or go to elcamino.edu. ER
