ArtSpan – ArtSpan Art Auction
Auction Ends: Apr 13, 2015 02:59 AM PDT

Auction Event Art

"Dita" by Amy Ahlstrom

Item Number
502
Estimated Value
1250 USD

Live Event Item

This is a Live Event Only item.

Item Description

2014, Dupioni silk & cotton, 24 x 24

Item Special Note

Artist Statement: My art begins on city streets: in alleyways, on the sides of buildings, & sometimes on garbage bins. I am an urban quilter. Inspired by the street art, signage, & graffiti in city neighborhoods, I take digital photos of images I find, sampling & remixing them into urban quilts. I use vibrant silk & black cotton to create quilts that reflect a stream-of-consciousness vision of an urban place that is both real & imagined. The quilts I create are thematically dense, full of sampled layers of meaning. Utilizing the hundreds of digital photographs I take while exploring city streets, I assemble a collage via computer, make Paper patterns, & design quilts of Dupioni silk & cotton. All of the images in my quilts are cut by hand & I quilt by 'drawing' with a sewing machine: moving the fabric under the needle to create intricate patterns. The resulting artworks are tactile postcards of urban environments; modern pop art rendered in fabric. They reflect the experience of city life & serve as an historical record of a neighborhood, in that the places I capture are constantly in a state of flux. My art is of the moment; it occurs on the streets, in public, in city neighborhoods. Though it is quilted rather than drawn or painted, my work is most comparable to that of pop, lowbrow & graffiti artists. I juxtapose hand-drawn images of faces with text, written script, or graffiti, & balance heavier silhouettes with thin line drawings. The images I appropriate & reinterpret float over brightly colored backgrounds. The final works re-imagine the urban landscape & re-invent quilting as a pop art medium.