XXX by Maria Damon





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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