Karen Reimer’s work is rooted equally in the traditions of domestic craft and conceptual art, using their disjunctions to consider the values and assumptions that underlie both. She received a BA from Bethel College, Kansas, near where she grew up, and an MFA from the University of Chicago, the city where she now resides. Reimer’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at: LAXART, Los Angeles; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, which represents her work.
For more information, please see: http://www.karenreimer.info, Monique Meloche, and on Instagram @karen_suitcase.
Karen Reimer, Untitled (Percent Area for High Plains Drought), 2020. Embroidery. 20.5 x 23.5 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
First, and most importantly, how are you doing? How are you navigating the highs and lows?
First, thanks for inviting me to do this. In general, I’m doing really well. Most of the time I’m contented because the need to isolate lets me indulge my introversion without guilt. And it is a welcome break from busyness. But I realize that my ability to feel this way is not only my personality type, but also because I have the kind of job that allows me to work from home, and so I have not lost my income like so many other people. I know it's a privilege. I do periodically have bad days when I start reading news and commentary compulsively, and find myself coming up for air three hours later in a rage or depressed or anxious. I occasionally spend a day completely disconnected from the digital world to try to help with that.
Karen Reimer, Untitled (Average Maximum Temp.), 2020 (in process). Embroidery. 30 x 20.5 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
It's my experience that most artists engage with some level of self-isolation in their day to day art practice. Has this been your experience? And if so, have you found these innate rhythms to be helpful during this larger, world-wide experience of isolation?
I almost always work alone, hiring studio assistants only when I’m very busy, and my studio is in my home, which is lucky in these circumstances, so my work routines are not a lot different than they were before. When the stay-at-home period first started, I thought, “Oh, I’m going to get so much done, I’ll have so much more time!” But that hasn’t been the case. I wasn’t really factoring in the energy and time just adapting to doing everything at home would take. I find I’m working at pretty much the same pace as I ever did.
Karen Reimer, Shoretime, Spaceline, 2016. Installation at the Hyde Park Art Center. Fabric, wood, sand. 30 x 80 ft. Photo by Tom Van Eynde.
It would be great if you could briefly talk us through your practice. Understanding it is integral to appreciating the multivalence of your work.
My work is pretty much always produced through traditional craft techniques, usually embroidery, piecing, and quilting. Right now, I’ve got several different projects going. One is I’m embroidering charts and graphs, diagrams—visual information/displays of data. Sometimes onto printed fabric with decorative patterns, sometimes on just plain fabric. It's been a common tactic for me over a long time to push different visual and cultural languages together until they start to destabilize. I emphasize formal resemblances or what might be called visual puns between the charts and graphs and the decorative patterns, or just the disjunction between visual information and the traditionally decorative technique of embroidery: you start losing the meaning in the information displays as it turns into pattern or decoration; you can also start reading decorative pattern as if it conveyed information. I’m not so much trying to balance on a line between the two as to hold both possibilities in my mind at once. I often refer to the famous duck/rabbit optical illusion as an illustration of what I mean by this—i.e. you can see the duck or you can see the rabbit, but you can’t see them both at the same time. But even when you’re seeing one, you know the other one is still there.
Karen Reimer, Sleeping Under the Sky, Sleeping Under the Lake, 2017. (detail). Quilt. 90 x 96 in. Photo by James Prinz.
The charts and graphs I’m copying are all showing information related to climate change, usually as it affects Lake Michigan, which I live beside in Chicago. I started using these images because I’ve gotten obsessed with climate change for the obvious reason that it is escalating and the reality of impending disaster is right up in our faces now. I’m not alone in this, of course. I spend a lot of time researching how it’s affecting my local environment, and I just naturally start working with what I spend time thinking about. And whatever else is going on in the work, I do want to point to the facts of climate change over and over.
I’ve also been working on a long, slow quilt-making process. A few years ago, I did a large installation titled Shoretime, Spaceline that included a 30 x 80 foot stretch of blue pieced fabric. That fabric has been used and re-used several times in my work, and before that it was clothes, sheets, etc.—I got it all second-hand—so it’s had a number of lives, and my thought was that I would “retire” this fabric by making it into quilts, into useful objects, and it could then go back out into the non-art world it came from, there to be used until it wore out, and that would be its end. The origin of quilt-making is the principle of re-use, so it seems fitting to make my old art into quilts.
I’ve been interested in making useful objects for a long time, too, because that's where craft has traditionally lived, and I like to reference that tradition, and also because I like the idea of my artworks having some value, at least potentially, that is not visual, or contemplative, or financial—the usual values we consider in the case of artwork. Even if people don’t actually ever use my work, the use value is there as a potential, and that affects how the work is experienced. It puts the viewer into a different relationship with the work.
Karen Reimer, Sleeping Under the Sky, Sleeping Under the Lake, 2017. Quilt. 90 x 96 in. Photo by James Prinz.
Has any of your imagery shifted in a reflection to what's currently happening? Or are you considering using coronavirus related imagery for future projects? Do you find it necessary to make work about the pandemic? And why, or why not?
Well, those beautiful graphs of pandemic curves we are all so intimately familiar with now would fit right into my current embroidery project. Not just because they display information, but also because I could probably make a case for the pandemic being related to environmental changes.
I think questions about how visual languages work, how information is conveyed to us, how that information can become pattern, how form delivers content—all those questions are always relevant and necessary, pandemic or not.
Karen Reimer, Untitled (Sea level change (mm), 2020. Embroidery. 21 x 18 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
Karen Reimer, Untitled (U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook), 2019. Embroidery. 14 x 15 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
What do you think or hope will be different after this crisis has passed?
What I think and what I hope are not always aligned. I try to be optimistic, but it is not easy in the current political climate of the US. What I hope will happen is that the flaws in our current system have been so clearly revealed by the pandemic—the precarity of many people’s income and therefore food and shelter, the number of people without access to health care, the complete lack of social services and safety nets that are the result of years of capitalist policies valuing profit over people—I hope that people, having seen that, will be motivated to change things, to vote out the politicians who made and defend those policies. The current protests against racist police brutality give me hope. A lot of people are showing up.
Karen Reimer, Untitled (Record high, 1986, Record low, 2018), 2020. Embroidery. 14 x 15.25 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
Karen Reimer, Untitled (Change in Average Temperature), 2019. Embroidery. 14 x 17 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
What research or writing are you doing that you find compelling? What are you reading?
A friend gave me a book on a Scandinavian tapestry artist who was new to me—Hannah Ryggen, 1894-1970. She was a feminist, communist, anti-war activist. I’m interested in her combination of narrative imagery and pattern/decoration. I’ve also read “William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary” by E.P. Thompson, a British Marxist social historian. I’ve been interested in Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement as a reaction to the Gilded Age because that time period had a lot in common with our current age of unregulated capitalism and destruction of the working class.
These two books are related in that Thompson, Morris, and Ryggen shared politics, although they all have slightly different versions of communism/socialism. And Morris and Ryggen were both craftspeople who felt that way of working was directly related to their politics.
I’m reading a lot of novels now, too, which is my favorite thing to do.
Karen Reimer, Untitled (48% surface melt pre 2005 after 2005 90% surface melt), 2019. (detail). Embroidery. 28.5 x 15.5 in. Image courtesy of the artist.