While working abroad in a studio in Berlin, Pauline-Rose Dumas, a young artist who lives in Montreuil, France, and received training in printmaking and textile design, came to see her tools in a new light. “A tiny needle left on the floor becomes a kind of crazy architecture when you look at it nonstop for hours,” Dumas told one interviewer.
Her current show seems to bear the fruits of the altered perspective — the “Alice in Wonderland” plunge down a rabbit hole — that may ensue when you spend enough time both isolated in a studio and disoriented by unfamiliar surroundings.
Her show has textile works, along with metal sculptures featuring tendriled arcs that every now and then morph from abstract forms into recognizable sewing-kit accessories, made cartoonishly large: embroidery scissors, or an intertwining spiraled pattern of two-ply thread. They evoke the spirit of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s sculptures of quotidian objects blown up into absurdly monumental scale. Some of Dumas’s sculptures, like the giant sewing needles, pierce her textile pieces as if pinning them to the wall.
The fabric works could almost be called quilts, if they weren’t so chaotic and free- form. Perhaps they’re better described as the Frankensteined contents of a scrapbook kept by an inquiring mind. Floral patterns appear alongside an image printed on fabric of a transmission tower at sunset. Undulating seams merge into sine waves on graph paper. You get the sense that Dumas has dispensed with whatever boundaries normally separate tools, materials and ideas. Her resulting explorations are gratifying to watch.
