PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present the loom-paintings of Jen P. Harris in their first exhibition with the gallery. Harris lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Exhibition dates are January 10th through February 14th. An artist conversation begins at 2pm. The reception follows from 3pm through 5:30pm.

Jen P. Harris repositions the relationship between painting and weaving in their one-person exhibition, Tomboy. Harris’ paintings pose an intersection of ambiguity, where neither painting nor weaving resolves without the slippage between both. Suspending expectations, they obscure their paintings by animating the surface as a loom, stretching a warp of yarn from the top profile of the painting to the bottom of the stretcher, whereupon they needle weave the weft in response to the newly camouflaged composition. Harris’ unique approach electrifies the dance between media, each transgressing the space and story held by the other. Their paintings become a queer metaphor where concrete morphs and dissolves into a river of nonlinear multiplicity.

“This departure from the material hierarchy of paint over canvas, this repositioning of cloth, conventionally rendered invisible and inert by paint, as an agent with a presence all its own, is quite possibly the thing I was searching for all those years. It lets me stir things up. Working with the thread has become the method by which I can make visible that which I sense in the painting but cannot reach with paint alone.” – Jen P. Harris