FRANCESCA CAPONE // Material Memory

On view October 7–November 27, 2022
Opening reception Saturday, October 8 (3–5 p.m.)

Nationale is pleased to present Material Memory, Francesca Capone’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. Material Memory is part of Portland Textile Month, a city wide festival celebrating textile artists, businesses, schools, and cultural organizations.

Each piece in this series is an assembled material memory: cut from fabric that carries history from former lives. Focusing on a zero-waste practice, these works utilize scrap to create visual/tactile objects that take on new identities and narratives in their combination. A magical property of textile is its ability to be reconstructed, cut apart, and put back together. The reassembled forms come purely from intuition, there is no precise pattern to their combination, and the process is guided by feeling. Coming from a multigenerational family of Sicilian American fashion industry workers, the works include portions of a large collection of maternal fabric scraps that have been passed down. Each cut of fabric has provenance from a former function: ribbons and fabrics that have been passed down through family, offcuts from former studio projects, discarded or cut clothing overdyed scraps, hand towels, napkins, and good will finds. The scraps of textiles have their own silent stories from Capone’s personal history and beyond that, a place where they were made, and people whom they were made by. The process of their assembly has involved intuitive sensing, Capone thoughtfully uses her hands and eyes to puzzle out what should be placed where, as though guided by spiritual external influences. As the compositions are created, new arrangements are revealed through the process of making.

Francesca Capone is a visual artist, writer, and textile designer. Her books Text means Tissue (2017), and Writing in Threads (2015) focus on textile poetics. She has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, LUMA/Westbau in Switzerland, Textile Arts Center in NYC, Nationale in Portland, OR, and 99¢ Plus Gallery in Brooklyn. Capone has been an artist in residence at the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Andrea Zittel's A-Z West, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. More of her published work can be found at Gauss PDF, Tunica Magazine, and in The New Concrete from Hayward Press. Her academic work includes lectures and workshops at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Leeds Beckett University, Reed College, University of Washington, and Alberta College of Art and Design, among others. She joined Nationale as a represented artist in the fall of 2018.

PRESS & MORE
Fall’s Visual Arts Preview, Briana Miller, The Oregonian, September 13, 2022
October Is Portland Textile Month, Janet Eastman, The Oregonian, September 29, 2022
Editor’s Snapshot, Ashley Gifford, Arts and About PDX, October 2022

Essay by Cat Kron