Elaine Reichek: Pixels, Bytes, and Stitches

Abstract

Since the early 1970s feminist artists have been using embroidery as a vehicle to reclaim female agency in contemporary artistic practice and to question the validity of a hierarchy of genres in the history of art. Roszika Parker's Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and Making of the Feminine, published in 1984, was the first text to research and evaluate the history of this art form and its important role, as a form of cultural production, in validating women's contributions to global history.1 For the last four decades, the New York-based artist Elaine Reichek has been making work that unravels the tradition of the embroidered sampler—as an educational exercise designed to “frame truisms and life lessons for girls and young women within decorative patterns”—retooling this domestic format to critique the patriarchal and modernist assumptions of our culture.2 In her most recent bodies of work Reichek uses the medium of embroidery to interrogate the complicated relationships among art history, representation, and technology.3 By juxtaposing hand-made cross-stitches with those produced by a computer-programmed sewing machine in samplers that simulate famous works of art, Reichek offers an incisive commentary on the many forms of translation and remediation that are integral to the history of mark-making and illusionism in Western visual culture. For those interested in cyber-based art practices, her longtime engagement as a classically trained painter-become-needlewoman with the history of technology and mechanical and digital production offers an interesting point of departure.