C Mag
"Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother" — Meghann O’Brien (Jaad Kuujus/Kwaxhi’laga) with Andy Everson, Jay Simeon, Kate Hennessy, Hannah Turner, Reese Muntean, Conrad Sly, Jaimie Isaac, Doenja Oogjes
Meghann O’Brien (Jaad Kuujus), Sky Blanket, 2014
In the light of April’s solar eclipse, a multidisciplinary team transported precious belongings by plane from British Columbia to New York City. Sky Blanket (2014), a Raven’s Tail and Chilkat style weaving, and an untitled robe, both by Haida/Kwakwaka’wakw/Irish artist Meghann O’Brien (Jaad Kuujus/Kwaxhi’laga), moved through an extended sunset to meet their kin: Wrapped in the Cloud (2018), a digital iteration of Sky Blanket. Made through 3-D scanning, photogrammetry, and hydroelectric power from the Coast Mountains, its name references both computational processing and the cloudy source of Sky Blanket’s mountain-goat wool weft. These motifs echo Sky Blanket’s spatial arrangement, as three central ancestors’ bone-like outlines float in this space between ground and sky. The untitled robe, the most recent of the three works, transfigures both Sky Blanket and Wrapped in the Cloud. Woven on a digital TC2 Jacquard loom with mercerized cotton warp and weft, and finished by O’Brien with handspun wild mountain-goat wool dyed yellow with wolf moss, this robe’s hand-worked components undo its mechanized weaving—a material reminder, too, that Jacquard weaving, with its chains of punch cards, is an ancestor of modern computation.
Meghann O’Brien, video still from Wrapped in the Cloud, 2018
Shown together for the first time at Bard Graduate Center’s pop-up installation, the triptych is deeply collaborative, and embodies both community protocols and the distributed expertise of the makerspace. Following Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw gender protocols for weaving, artists Andy Everson and Jay Simeon designed the pattern board for Sky Blanket with O’Brien. The laborious gathering of mountain-goat wool, processing, and working row by row both takes and marks time. The ceremonial demand for Sky Blanket in O’Brien’s community—it is sized to fit her grandmother—was echoed in requests for its exhibition by galleries. In order to meet this demand while prioritizing its community use, O’Brien reached out to Simon Fraser University’s Making Culture Lab, where Kate Hennessy, Hannah Turner, Reese Muntean, Conrad Sly, and Jaimie Isaac assisted in the design and programming for Wrapped in the Cloud. This solution has profound implications for repatriation: the new iteration can be displayed in gallery settings while Sky Blanket is danced in community. Similarly collaborative in its production, the untitled robe was woven on the digital loom with the assistance of Doenja Oogjes while O’Brien was pregnant and observing a community prohibition on weaving, protecting against her umbilical cord wrapping around her baby. Its combination of O’Brien’s hand-worked mountain-goat wool components and synthetic strands underscores its singularity: this work, too, is an object of individuated care, insisting on the bodily scale of digital processes.
In conversation with curator Laura Allen, O’Brien and her collaborators referred to the digital form and machine-assisted weaving as “descendant works.” Displayed in birth order, Sky Blanket’s regalia form is referenced in the glowing data points of Wrapped in the Cloud, which translate into the untitled robe’s spackled and blurred motifs. Astonishingly, both descendant works reveal a star field that O’Brien had contemplated but not realized in Sky Blanket’s design. In her weaver’s care for materials, O’Brien’s work slows down the process of machine-assisted making, asserting a family resemblance that preserves both relatedness and autonomy.
"Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother" was presented on April 10th 2024 at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.
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About contributors
EUGENIA KISIN is a writer and scholar based in New York, where she is Associate Professor of Art and Society at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her book, Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press