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Amber Jean Young
Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles, California
Preview by Liz Goldner


Amber Jean Young, "The Drive In Floods Through Me," 2014, linen fabric, muslin fabric, batting, and thread

Continuing through November 15, 2014

Drawing on childhood memories, fantasies and imagination, Amber Jean Young creates quilted artworks as two-dimensional wall hangings and as three-dimensional sculptures. In “There’s Shape in These Hills I Know,” this daughter of singer/songwriter/musician Neil Young pays homage to an idyllic time when folklore provided the creative inspiration, and when needles, thread and fabric were used to manifest it. Having sketched and painted from early childhood, she studied art in college, eventually concentrating on painting large abstract canvasses. Since 2011, she has exhibited her work in several galleries in the Bay Area, where she lives.
 
Young segued two years ago from abstract painting to building quilted wall hangings and sculptures, using as inspiration memories of rural northern California where she grew up. She quotes from a book by Nelson Goodman, the phrase, “Worldmaking starts from worlds already on hand: the making is a remaking." She uses this quote as part of this 26-piece exhibition, as each piece displayed is based on memories of her early homeland, or on what is, “already on hand.” For each work she begins by photographing scenes from home. She prints these images onto linen or cotton fabric, and then cuts each piece of fabric into several smaller pieces — what she calls “base images.” The next step is to assemble, in collage fashion, several seemingly disparate fragments into one larger work, each with images that combine the familiar with the fanciful. During this creative process, she plays with color, contrast and proportion, drawing on her experience as a painter. The final process is to sew each quilt into three layers, including the addition of batting and backing. By piecing together quilts, Young works with what she calls, “folkloric” materials. She adds that these quilts, created in various sizes, are art pieces to be hung on the walls or displayed as sculptures, “not to be used on queen-size beds.”
 
Young’s quilted works are divided into several series. There are lush classic rural landscapes, some with geometric bits of fabric, all sewn to classic tan and beige colored linen or cotton. The effect is an unusual blending of traditional quilting with old-fashioned scenes, usually arranged abstractly. “When I fish around, I feel the haunting” is a series of seven wall hangings keyed to verdant evergreens, several interspersed with strips or pieces of raw linen. The “I remember it in pieces” series features horizontal landscapes with trees against fields, hills water and sky, some set nearly symmetrically within the linen. In four “Land Forms” sculptural pieces, she combines landscapes with trees, mountains and sky mounted on tan linen; she then shapes each completed quilt into forms that mimic the hills, mountains or rocks. Four works, “Radiant World, “Severed Sky,” “Sky Over Field” and “Reimagining Worlds,” the most abstract works in this show, are arrangements of small landscapes and cutouts of natural elements such as sea and sky, combined with strips of monochromatic, geometric material.
 
Young explains, “I read somewhere that when people remember, they fill in the bits they can't remember with what they think is there or happened, oftentimes without realizing they are doing it ... I quilt collages of the landscape to reference the way I remember, and forget.” In fact, the total package of Young’s works, including the images, the arrangements, the quilting material and the method of creating these quilts, produces artworks that conjure up memories of bucolic scenes from a time seemingly long ago.

Published courtesy of ArtSceneCal ©2014

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