Elaine Reichek

Anna Akhmatova, Elena Ferrante, and William Blake are among the writers whose work this Conceptualist feminist excerpts in thirty new needlework canvases, in which serif typefaces and wobbly cursive are rendered with labor-intensive precision. The quotes have been very carefully chosen; Reichek does not make words into images to divest them of their significance. Rather, her painstaking transmutations—from paper to linen, from ink to thread—slow down the reading process, drawing attention to the intimate quality of handwriting or the authority of mechanical printing. New meanings sometimes arise. Sophocles’ lines “I stabbed out these eyes. Why should I have eyes? Why, when nothing I saw was worth seeing?” read quite differently when you imagine a woman working, needle in hand, rather than Oedipus wailing.