Unlikely Encounters in Accent Sisters Latest Exhibition

Floating and fighting gravity, exuding contradicting charms, Di Gao’s textile work looks both old and new, familiar and strange, futuristic yet traditional. Close to uncategorizable, although it is certainly within the realm of textile and wearable art. Colorful yarns and rubber tubes are knitted over intricately woven copper wires, patterns over patterns, and shapes inside shapes. Underneath each piece rests a circle of yarn, signaling an origin. By destabilizing and challenging the subjective formation of modernity, Di Gao invites us to ponder the question: What is modern, and where shall we go?

Wearables are filled with air and space, becoming autonomous characters. In Di Gao’s solo show “Somewhere Beyond the Body” at Accent Sister’s New Jersey location, the media specificity of textile art is pronounced. The absence of mannequins and models gestures a break from the fashion industry. In the gallery space, the pieces cease to be garments, waiting to be redefined. Di Gao took a year to create the collections as a form of “soft protest, sitting on a sofa in her friend’s living room she threaded and crocheted the passage of time. Curated by Q12, the exhibition as a whole reads as a radical statement to do away with fast fashion.

Solely hand-crafted most works are untitled, adding to their ambiguity. Found objects incorporated into the works that resemble bird cages or fish nets from a distance are at the end of their life span. Closer up the details evoke marine life or microscopic creatures. Loaded with colors and associations, these pieces seem like relics from tribespeople or aboriginal clans or costumes for hunter-gatherers and foragers. It is clear that art-making became her sanctuary, and the works are ripe with imagination and mastery of her craft.

Encrypted into her work, through process and position, is a defiance of market-driving value judgment; they participate in a debate on the very nature of crafts. Craft practices that require extensive time commitment are often considered wasteful, or unproductive. Retrospectively, the protest has been joyful and non-struggling, she explains to me, “It was formative for the artist to work intimately with the fibers and innovate traditional artisanal techniques while furthering my material language,# she continues.

In the “Closed-loop Universe,” the only titled collection, shoulder bags are molded into shapes that resemble human organs—or tropical pitcher plants—decorated with accordion-like pleats that expand and shrink. These pieces most exemplify Di Gao’s wrestling with fashion and art making, fusing the organic and inanimate. Combining the two most basic shapes, the sphere, and the circle, she made them look otherworldly and delightful. In addition to creating visually stimulating forms, Di Gao emphasizes tactility as an additional dimension. She wants the work to be touched and felt, instead of confined to art-viewing. Di Gao made them into flexible and durable objects that can participate in mundane activities. She wants her work to be gazed at in awe in a concrete jungle, instead of being put away in a museum.

Through the wearables on view, Di Gao sends us into a far-off future, which resembles the past. There fishermans’ daughters and bee breeders are living harmoniously with nature and industrial and technological revolutions are nowhere to be found.

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