In Material Data, Samantha Bittman presents a new body of work including a series of paintings on handwoven textiles, custom digitally printed wallpaper, and a handmade tile floor sculpture.
In her paintings Bittman exploits the limitations of the basic floor loom. By designing and executing weave drafts, which consist of simple sets of numerically based instructions; she generates woven cloth whereby the architecture of the weave interlacements and the graphics of the cloth are one in the same.
The Chicago artist plays with the graphic quality of her weave, at times underlining its patterning with paint. Filling out the corners are dizzyingly disorienting digitally printed wallpaper pulled from the geometrics of her paintings and tile sculpture spinning off a traditional houndstooth.
Once stretched over traditional painting stretcher bars, the textile patterns, which often become distorted by the act of stretching, direct and dictate the painted surface. These moves are both intuitive and logical. In several works, the weave graphics are replicated precisely in paint, negating the materiality of the textile in favor of the pictorial aspects of the cloth. In other instances, selectively painted areas merge with their underlying textile support, further flattening the picture plane and perceptually disorienting the viewer.
Think about texture of woven textile from my loom in a painting structure, or as an underlying canvas with weaving pattern as a geometric texture.