Modern Art

Creations made with needle and thread are typically relegated to arts and crafts museums, but two solo exhibits this month at the Catharine Clark Gallery place the medium in a fine-art context. Angela Lim's new series, "Exemplum," is named after the Latin word for "sampler," a term for the needlework offered to potential suitors in Victorian-era households. Lim's elaborately stitched diptychs -- a watercolor of the pattern juxtaposed against the finished piece -- appear at first like quaint embroidered handiworks, but on closer inspection display powerful messages. Stitched into the fabric are Lim's own prose poems -- "Feeling the violent rupture/ Welcome to womanhood/ under her husband's knife/ prior to the wedding night" -- which deal with issues of identity, sexuality, and domesticity. A separate work also in this exhibit, Whitework Band Sampler, 2002, is similarly rebellious: A white quilt that seems to be painted with patches of color is actually stained with menstrual blood and sperm.

Things aren't as they appear in Jil Weinstock's "painting" Ultra Aqua, 2002.

Details

The exhibits run through Jan. 11

Admission is free

399-1439

The Catharine Clark Gallery, 49 Geary (at Kearny), Second Floor, S.F.

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More About

• Angela Lim
• Jil Weinstock
• University of California-Berkeley
• Sewing
• Arts and Crafts

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Jil Weinstock, a New York-based artist with an MFA from UC Berkeley, doesn't sew as part of her brightly colored sculptures, but she also takes inspiration from so-called "women's work." Weinstock encases dresses, beads, feather boas, and tutus in rubber, producing casts that from a distance resemble abstract paintings. To make her new series, "Black Cherry,"a massive multipaneled grid that takes up more than 16 feet of gallery wall space, Weinstock embedded various lengths of colored zipper within layers of translucent, liquid rubber poured into cake pans. The results look like stripes painted on a canvas.

Though Lim and Weinstock employ different skills, they both work with textiles and fiber art, and both are experts in the art of subversion. When you first look at their pieces, you might think you're seeing an intricate drawing or a painting, but with a second glance you'll realize you've been had. Needlework art is nothing new, but the attitude of these contemporary artists is. They've given the form the respect it deserves, and have viewers' admiration all sewn up.