XXX by Maria Damon
Quarter-letter, full-color chapbook, side-sewn, Japanese stitching, 32 pages.
$12
Daniel Tiffany writes of Damon's XXX: "In Maria Damon’s affectionate album of
contemporary needlework, one discovers on one of its pages a sampler decorated,
quite conventionally, with images of plants and butterflies, but also alluding to the Millay sisters’ girlhood project of learning the “bohemian vernacular”
of their friends: a tableau of flowers
and cuss words. Needlepoint samplers,
unlike the historically segregated media of the fine arts, have always mixed
words and pictures, and despite the usual
association of girlhood and domesticity, frequently found use as a rough medium
of subversion and alarm. Damon’s
stitchery reminds us that the base and decorative materialism of traditional
craftwork lends itself with deceptive affinity to infidel causes, conceptual
polarities, and embodied critique."
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