Clothesline — Couch in the Desert

Emily Auchincloss, Clothesline at Lulu

by D.K. Sole

Clothesline was a reminder that Las Vegas doesn’t have a lot of spaces like this where an artist can freely debut an idea at scale without worrying about rent, profitability, etc, although there’s also that recent display under the freeway by Resorts World. The house’s backyard was floored with stones, just stones, and over them were stretched two clotheslines, and on the clotheslines were the artworks. Emily Auchincloss had made flaglike banners out of light cloths—silks—hand-dyed with natural colors, cochineal, avocado pits; mostly indigo. She’d done this while she was here from Boston, in an informal artist’s residency at the privately rented art-focused place known as Lulu mostly on the day (Sunday) before the one-night show opened (Monday), although we watched her dye one of them the day before that (Saturday).

So the prep time was short and the forms themselves dissolved and reconstituted according to the faintest winds, and in other words it risked being dismissed as very slight work, in the way that Richard Tuttle does, with his surface-carelessness and general threat of preparing to fall apart at any minute. (When she mentioned the possibility of creating a long piece by stitching multiple banners together I thought of his 2015 series, The Critical Edge.) But there are clues to tell you that an idiosyncratic series of ideas is being compounded together after long, considered thought: there are circles patterned into the dye, and on the first clothesline the flags have pockets sewn on them. That’s arresting: why pockets? I remember her previous residency here in 2023 when she made woven pockets and invited people to collaborate by filling them. This was different, the pockets on the banners didn’t need to be filled. Pockets are always at the point of potential interaction. The circular shapes appear in different ways: on one banner they’re a grid, on another banner they’re a central mass radiating lines that were created by clamping a long stick onto the folded cloth, a gesture of casual ingenuity.

Pockets and flowers, she said. A flower is a pocket, there’s something inside. It opens. Avocado-pit dye and soft cloth had given a brownish fleshiness to sewn forms that imitated the pendulous shapes of interior pants pockets. Because they’re not a shape that we normally see they suggested more visible exterior things, like boxing gloves or commas. (My mind tried to find a comparison with Ellsworth Kelly’s method of manufacturing shapes out of the not-there spaces between things. Maybe you feel those between-spaces with your eyes, like putting your hand in the pants pocket, but you don’t see them … OK, no, it wasn’t convincing.) Then the pockets on the banner next to it were U-shaped, the ones we’re used to seeing. They were attached at the top so that they hung down helplessly when the banner rose in the wind. They emphasized the nonhumanness of the piece: here was a thing without bones, with no frontal face to maintain.

The pockets put the idea of touch into play, ditto the hand-dyeing, ditto the way the banners would reach out towards you or shy away, billowing at a strokable height. Rising, they asked to be pulled back down. (Artwork, behave!) A girl who was there told us how the cochineal had been scraped off a cactus in their garden. I like to garden, Auchincloss said—so then the circle-flowers were also here as something a person touches as they’re gardening, and of course, the sun (those radiant rectangles were rays as well as petals) was coming down and touching us. The U-pocket banner was made of organza, rougher than the other silks, gleaming in tiny striations, like the surface of water with a weight to it, with a tendency to bend as well as curve. It gave me the odd impression—standing on this extremely dry plane of stones—of being under a river and looking up.

Before I went to this event I visited an exhibition by Mak and their collaborators at Kaleidoscope near Cornish Pasty downtown, Every Night I Think About Changing My Life … and Especially So Since I Met You. The strongest parts of that show, to me, were the ones where another type of compounding had taken place—maybe the artist painted a green line that put the idea of a frame (but not an actual frame) around an unframed image of a sleeping dog so that you had the dog in both a contained and uncontained state. Mak’s work was recently featured in the BFA group thesis show at the Donna Beam [UNLV], and I thought the strong moments of that show, too, were places where the artists had deftly packed ideas together—Haide Calle making the stalks of her cloth plants out of a commercial textile with a curling pattern on it that, when she contextualized it like this, naturally became tendrils—or Lane Sheehy’s way of putting a social hierarchy into the stacked advertisements of a shopping mall sign. I sometimes see artworks described as “poetic” when they illustrate something adorable (most recently it was a picture of a leafy garden on Instagram), but this compounding is closer to the way poetry works—using language to expand things by folding them into one another, teased coherence—as Donne sketched out in his preface to An Anatomy of the World: “by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented.”

Clothesline was on view at Lulu in Las Vegas on May 27, 2024.

Artist website

Lulu Instagram

Image credit: D.K. Sole.

Australian artist D.K. SOLE lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is the Director of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.

Published and posted by Lyssa Park on June 23.