A.I.R. Gallery

Leslie Kneisel

The Tarantula Series

Over the years I’ve explored many processes and media. This exploration started with my masters degree program in printmaking which served to foster and advance my love affair with line, texture and processes. I now use embroidery thread on fabric to create my drawing/sculptures.

This manner of working began in 2002 when I was searching for another way to draw lines and remembered Ghada Amir, whose work I’d seen previously at the Whitney Biennial, who also works with thread on canvas. I started creating nonsensical narrative drawings with hybridized figures that morphed from one tableaux into another. These were then transferred to fabric and embroidered. I was concerned with women’s issues and looking at how gender relationships function through dysfunction.

Now my drawings are sexually explicit. Sexually explicit art is our equivalent of history paintings, of landscape paintings. Providing what the market wants. These drawings that are embroidered on fabric and then upholstered like something from the Edwardian era are meant to be beautiful, funny, and perverse. They depict things like tarantula beings having wanton sex with Pamela Anderson types. Cartoons meet porn. Science fiction meets Rabelais. This is demurely embroidered erotica spoofing pornography. I do live in the South where certain things are still taboo, and what is more enticing than that which is private, taboo and forbidden. I just happen to use tarantulas as my vehicle.

In the Fall of 2003 I was inspired by a visit to Joshua Tree National Park I made with a friend. We were on a quest to view first-hand the mating habits of the tarantulas inhabiting the desert there. Alas, our trip was to no avail. But I was so struck with the exaggerated, surreal qualities of the landscape there that it was easy to imagine the ribald tragicomedy that tarantula romance involves.

I use hybridization to create a world of morphing imagery that suggests an absence of permanence, where nothing is stable but constantly shifting. This non-monumental, non-heroic approach is a deliberate withdrawal from the standard used by most artists today of rationality and efficiency. The work is meant to remind us of issues that are unpopular or unspeakable in our current culture and the desire for sanctuary. In today’s sociopolitical turmoil it is not surprising that some artists should turn to the fantastical.

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