Anila is visiting Arizona State University Art Museum as part of an exchange program between E. European and American Artists. Originally from Albania, she now lives in Milan, Italy. She's working on a quilt of sorts for which she needs many hands to help stitch drawings on to leather sections.
I went to a talk by Anila about a week ago shortly after arriving in Arizona. Anila produces work that regards our notions of home, privacy, the outward v/s inward look and experience of cities, neighborhoods, homes. She uses stitches to create drawings on paper, fabric, and 3D paper structures, literally stitching together private with public notions. My most favorite of her work, not readily documented yet, is a collection of stitched drawings of aerial views of cities with overlayed stitched drawings of couples in different sex positions. The reason for the city's existance and size: procreation, yet sex is behind closed doors, behind the buildings' facades. Here they are surfaced together, one because of the other because of the other.
So, she's working Tuesdays through Fridays through Oct. 17 and I'm going each Tuesday to put my sewing skills to work! Here's me and the crew last Tuesday (you can see the swatches of leather and thread ready to be stitched):
An example of Anila's previous work. You can see that she not only sews into the paper's surface, she also punctures designs into the paper and often lights from behind (or within, if a 3D form).
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