“Rug Life” / Caroline Picard
- Democracy Chain
- Apr 17
- 5 min read
by Caroline Picard
Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, California
Exhibition continues through April 20, 2025
Rugs and carpets have been ubiquitous in daily domestic life for millennia, tracing back to around 3000 BC when they were first produced by shepherds and goat herders. So often relegated to the floor, their comprising pattern and materiality reflects intersecting trade routes, belief systems, and modes of production that literally weave together into a single, coherent surface — one so domesticated as to become part of a subliminal background. A current survey exhibition presents a selection of thirteen contemporary artists from around the world who engage the rich history of carpet-making in order to reflect on the political nuance and spiritual essence of today’s world.
Not surprisingly, these rugs weave together a variety of conflicts. Ai Weiwei’s "Tyger", (2022) an orange, black, tan, and cream carpet inspired by Tibetan tiger rugs. Whereas the Tibetan form of Ai’s work references East Indian tiger pelts once used as a seat of meditation, and introduced by East Indian Lamas, he modifies his rendition of the popular Tibetan form. In his version, the tiger’s spine lies behind the picture plane, out of view, such that its face appears centered at the top of a horizontal picture plane across from its tail, which curves around the bottom. Four paws dart towards the center from the perimeter, claws protracted to carve out a negative space in the form of a letter ‘X.’ Compositionally, “Tyger” infers circle-square relations via the hidden but curled body of the animal, which is contorted to encircle the visible perimeter of the picture plane.
The piece thus recalls the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet when the legendary King Songtsen Gampo, with the help of a Chinese wife, tamed a Srin Mo demoness now conflated with the Tibetan landscape. Like Ai’s tiger, the spirit lies on her back. And also like Ai’s feline, she is restricted by circle-square relations, as indicated in her case by Tibertan Buddhist commemorative monuments, or stupas. Renowned as much for his political detente with the Chinese government as for his art, Ai is represented here by an enigmatic, even cryptic object that withholds the privilege of the artist’s political agenda: is the tiger simply a form he has appropriated, was it produced as an act of solidarity, or did he have a more personal narrative in mind?
In another wall-mounted rug, “California Drought” (from the Dryland Series), (2024), Dutch artist Liselot Cobelens employs different weaving patterns and textures to reformulate drought data induced by climate change in wetland areas. Composed of variously looping textures, the resulting abstraction immediately resembles a landscape with blue waterway-like passages that start at the base and fade upwards into light brown, green, tan, and dark gray, with a streak resembling a thin line of fog at the top. “California Drought” digests data and might therefore best represent the curators’ stated desire to connect text and textile through the (albeit impressionistic) presentation of hard data. It is worth reflecting on whether these rugs can ever provoke real action or whether they are destined to remain covertly present, inflecting political commentary obliquely rather than directly, like a diplomatic emissary.
As objects invariably associated with (and often made to lie on) the ground, rugs are understandably driven by interpretations of geographic landscape. Nevertheless, works in “Rug Life” steadily open up definitions of landscape in surprising ways that muddle distinctions between background and foreground, culture and nature, to question the politics such divisions belie. Hung on the wall like a flat-screen television, the Tlingit and Unangax artist Nicholas Galanin’s abstract wool and cotton work, “Signal Disruption, American Prayer Rug,” (2020) is comprised of off-white, yellow, red, and blue curved strips of color, interrupted by vertical black bars, and speckled with white flecks that, continuing the TV metaphor, read as static. As a single image based on vintage broadcast test patterns and interrupted by static that also reads as pixelation, “Signal Disruption, American Prayer Rug” conveys a visual lineage of media from past to present. Just as that visual snow corrupts the strips of color, their pattern suggests a lack of presence (i.e., of a TV show), thus the irony that no one is behind the screen that the artist has made the center of our attention. Galanin’s piece thus encourages us to interrogate the authority of media — so often relegated to the background of our attention as we conduct the banal activities of daily life.
Other rugs challenge us to reflect on what truly comprises landscape. Sarajevo,-born, Massachusetts-based Azra Akšamija plays on the relationship between the digital and the fibrous in “Palimpsest ‘89,” positioned horizontally on the floor while being raised ever so slightly above the ground. Akšamija thus upends the expected functionality, conflating a rug and screen while transforming Yugoslavian history into a 21-minute animation that weaves and reweaves that history. Akšamija thus shows that history itself is a political landscape, a shifting space best described through animation.
In “Grandpa’s Monobloc,” (2023) Kuwaiti-based Ali Cha’aban covers a mass-produced Western plastic chair — common in resettlement or refugee conditions — with a prayer rug. The suggestion is that prayer is portable, that sacred space can be established in the most mundane and liminal places, even as the effort to establish and maintain traditions of kinship are inflected or distressed by a foreign tradition of industrial production.
“Rug Life” realizes a broad but nevertheless rich portrait of today’s geopolitical conditions, offering a dramatically different alternative to traditional new media outlets. Each artist uses weaving techniques to digest the shifting political, ecological, and socioeconomic circumstances of our time through the portable and ancient form of carpets.
Caroline Picard is a writer, publisher and curator. Her writing has appeared in Artslant, ArtForum (critics picks), Flash Art International, and Paper Monument, among others. Fiction and comics appear under the name Coco Picard. Her first graphic novel, The Chronicles of Fortune, was published by Radiator Comics in 2017. She is the Executive Director of the Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005. Curating exhibitions since 2005, Picard has worked with artists like Takahiro Iwasaki, Ellen Rothenberg, Edra Soto, Xaviera Simmons, and others, presenting exhibitions at La Box ENSA Bourges, Gallery 400, The Hyde Park Art Center, Vox Popuili and more.
More at her website, cocopicard.com.
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