Courtney Childress. Fuzzy Logic.

About

By needling felt wool on canvas, Childress creates these new abstract ‘paintings’ that are steeped in art historical reference and personal experience. The pieces are ambivalent - a fuzzy space where colorful, vaguely recognizable woolen forms and objects float. The works include leftover yarn from the sweaters she knitted, likenesses of characters from her son’s cartoons and allude to anatomy textbook illustrations.

These hyper-tactile fiber pieces feel like joyful spontaneous expressions, but are made by the time intensive process of needle felting wool and yarn onto canvas. Using a special tool with barbed needles, Childress stabs through layers of brightly colored roving and unprimed canvas, tangling the fibers of the wool through the surface. Felting creates a halo of soft fibers that appear to grow from the substrate. 

The density of color in the works is based on the accretion of material applied and holes punched through the surface. The application of wool is done primarily on the back of the piece, setting up a direct dialectic between the artist and the work, the final piece is not a mirror, but a projection.

The title of the show Fuzzy Logic is taken from a term used in math and science to describe a set of data or information that is undefinable – neither true or false, or quantifiable, but reside in a space of unknown. Descriptive words like soft or hard or tall or short fall into this uncategorical category, as they do not provide an actual measurement and are relative terms. Childress’ works dissolve boundaries – painting-shaped drawing sculptures that you can touch with your eyes.