First of all, I don’t seek to use cheap materials and “crafty” processes. While I do use recycled and donated materials whenever possible in the interest of sustainability, I still aim to use the finest quality materials I can afford. I also use photoshop and other CAD programs in my design and printing process, which are not inexpensive. In fact they are used in professional design contexts. Furthermore, I endeavor to execute my “craft” as skillfully as I can, to closely emulate the consistency of industrially manufactured goods.

As I stated in my facebook post, many non-weavers immediately assume my fabrics are machine made, or at least factory made. I even overheard a viewer at a recent show comment “so do you think he’s got Pakistani children weaving these for 3 cents a day?”

The untrained eye assumes that I am the designer, but not the fabricator, of my art work. This “trompe l’oeil” so to speak, is precisely the goal of my artwork. In this way, my work speaks more to contemporary issues of “Design” and modes of production, and less to the second class status of “craft.”

The viewers preconceived notions about western “design” and manufacturing point to a larger societal disassociation with and disenfranchisement form modern modes of production.

Why do my viewers balk at the idea of an educated, “privileged” westerner hand weaving yards of cloth, but purchase inexpensive dry goods woven in a factory setting by underpaid laborers without a second thought?

Upon further contemplation I began to wonder how issues of masculinity, a running thread in my work, are presented by my investigation of design and modes of production.
Perhaps by elucidating our societies disassociation from the living history of the goods we consume, I can further point to a larger disenfranchisement from masculine identity and structures of patriarchy, which are at the very core of western society’s infrastructure.

Men (and increasingly women) choose “masculine” modes of sartorial expression in order to gain respect, political, and economic power; without knowing or questioning why these strategies read as “masculine.”

As a queer male artist who designs and hand makes textiles and garments in a conceptual fine art context, I deconstruct masculine identity and it’s sartorial iterations to position “queerness” in dialogue with modern consumption and modes of production.

If you make “sloppy craft,” I make “sloppy design.”
-JCS