Layers of Meaning

Karen Reimer - Boundaries, Pattern & Embroidery

Karen Reimer is a Chicago artist who is exploring concepts of pattern, context and limitation by creating embroidered interpretations of contemporary ephemera and trash.

For the exhibit, Reading Between the Lines, Karen Reimer writes of her work:

"My recent work examines the relationships between beauty, value and meaning by exploiting the tensions between copy and original, object and process and fine art and domestic craft. It demonstrates the out-of-control nature of language and the provisional quality of meaning.
The embroideries are laboriously produced copies of pieces of text taken from sources ranging from great books to candy wrappers ... Of course, in the case of the 'trash' pieces (fragments, product packaging, etc.), the original that is copied has no recognized value to begin with. Only the copy has value. In this way, the trash pieces function differently from the book pages. In the embroidered book pages, the illegibility of the text poses a loss. It is no longer possible to be certain of its meaning. The embroidered text teeters on the edge of legibility, relying heavily on pattern recognition, personal interpretation and guesswork. In attempting to decipher the ambiguous text, the reader projects him/herself into it. The piece functions like a Rorschach blot"

In the series Boundary Troubles, Reimer explores the meaning of boundaries at many levels: physical, visual, spiritual.

"In her new series of pattern-based work, Reimer plays off the implied endlessness of pattern by embroidering the figures of one fabric onto another. Sewing together pieces of fabric whose patterns have differing, sometimes conflicting, cultural associations of class, taste, gender, fashion era, and other domestic or social territories, the competing logic of each pattern dominates, transmutes, blends in or disappears. These mergings can be read as metaphors of infection or invasion, or as attempts to make wholes out of disparate parts. In any case, the results are inevitably incomplete and unresolved rather than neat coherent syntheses, and, as with much of Reimer's work, the amount of labor invested raises the question of whether such attempts are misguided or optimistic.
Reimer continues her investigation of pattern in another series based on notebook pages. Whereas much of her earlier work focused on re-creations of text, now the "text" becomes the sewn lines on the empty page, making the visual structure for the writing into the writing itself. Boundary Troubles is another exercise in order gone amok, order that doesn't know its boundaries, limitations or purpose."