Karen Reimer: The Domestic Partnership of Heaven and Hell at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
Karen Reimer works to establish something more complex, more ambiguous, more symbiotic than the traditional oppositional binary relationships that ground so much of our culture.
By combining the tactics and aesthetics of conceptual art with the tropes of domestic decoration, Reimer pushes concept and material, art and labor, language and linens, utopia and realism, heaven and hell into the same space.
In this body of work, Reimer exchanges language for the imagery of stylized nature so typical of domestic decoration. Starting with the literalism of replacing an image of flowers with the word “flowers”, Reimer embroiders quotations in which that word appears on pillowcases. Ranging from the poetic to the pedagogical, these quotations address the practices of craft and decoration and the assumptions and debates surrounding those practices, with several quotes taken from scholars and philosophers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Reimer is interested in revisiting that movement’s ideas about craft, manual labor, learning, domesticity, etc., as they translate into the contemporary digital age. The arrangement of the text on the pillowcases borrows equally from the traditions of embroidered pillowcase decoration and the formatting of language on computer screens, for example the blue boxing of selected words or the red strike-through of deletions when tracking changes.
