For her latest series, New York painter Caitlin MacBride took inspiration from 19th-century dye recipe books held at the Cooper Hewitt museum in Manhattan. The five new paintings that comprise Dyeing Notes, on view at Deanna Evans Projects, recreate these weathered swatches, rendering colorful patterns, handwritten notes, and frayed threads across a flat plane. Through subtle symbolism, MacBride explores the shifting value of working-class possessions as they enter the realm of high art.

Physically speaking, these paintings contain multitudes. On dense wood panels, MacBride intricately depicts notebooks open to their centerfolds. At the center, rectangular samples of decorative designs become windows into the hierarchies that structure production. Works such as “Labor in Making” and “Not Cut from the Quitting Cloth” display patterns of chains and bars, evoking slavery and prisons, while floral prints bring to mind bourgeois consumers who represent the end point of this process.

MacBride centered this series on a Massachusetts textile mill during the Civil War to hint at the bloody stakes of an irresolvable labor conflict, in which capitalists retain their industry ties by any means necessary. The fabrics sampled in these pages, commonly known as “delaines,” combined threads of wool and cotton, which respectively retained dye and maximized profits. The artist therefore interweaves what is traditionally women’s work with the broader exploitation of labor in the United States.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.