Tali Halpern, “making as being/hands praying,” 2024, handwoven fabrics on a TC2, cotton, wool, thread, paint, rhinestones and beads. Based on collaboration with Jane Serenska and Stephanie Jensen. Assist from Kate Hassett, 24” x 20”/Photo: Twelve Ten Gallery
The six textiles comprising this show are patchworks of various fibers (hope, wool, thread), beads and rhinestones. Each features an assemblage of pattern, image, color and medium, lending a scrapbook-like quality to the assemblages of photographic image, text and pattern. Importantly, most of the works in the exhibition were produced using a digital loom, a computer-controlled but manually operated machine. Although there is plenty of abstraction, the most striking feature of many of these works is the images, all of which feature Halpern as the performer. It is in these portraits that the effects of the digital loom are most apparent, as the line between human and machine, a binary cast another way as real and artificial, becomes deeply blurred.
There’s a distance the method of production builds into an encounter with Halpern’s likeness. The transformation of digital image to the surface of fiber blunts the immediacy of the photographic image, making them more photographic negative than full-color image. It’s an affective distance mirrored throughout the exhibition, not just in the relationship between content and technique, but between elements of the work’s contents themselves.
Tali Halpern, “afraid?,” 2024, handwoven fabrics on a TC2, cotton, wool, thread, paint, rhinestones and beads. 41” x 27”/Photo: Twelve Ten Gallery
Like an Instagram post, most of the works here are appended with text that functions like a caption. The textual components of the work are comprised of big statements, the tone of which is persistently unclear, often shifting manically between expressing vulnerability (“unappreciated”) and confidence (“truly blessed”).
As an example. In “(star)E Eyed,” an Elvira-like figure is surrounded by various snippets of text ranging from “innervision” to “crushed by the tumbling tide” to “shackled by lust?” The desaturated color palette (a feature shared by many of the works on view) and the conflict between the empowered figure at the center and the language that surrounds them are drenched in ambiguity. The lack of narrative clarity as well as the muted color palate traffics a sense almost of numbness, a slippery affect increasingly associated with online life.
The occasional triteness of Halpern’s hashtag speak and the performative poses of their figures are instantly recognizable, borrowed directly from the visual and linguistic vocabulary of social media. It would be easy for work that chooses to take the language of the medium so literally to rely on the space of the gallery to forge a critique of the way we perform and inhabit online space. But Halpern doesn’t rely on the ideology of visual art and the space of the gallery to do the work for them, their material choices speak for themselves while undermining any attempt to interpret these works as straightforwardly as one might be inclined.
Tali Halpern, “(star)E Eyed,” 2024, handwoven fabrics on a TC2, cotton, wool, rhinestones and beads. 48” x 26”/Photo: Twelve Ten Gallery
Inasmuch as the text and the images draw viewers in, the complexity of the weave and threadwork, the juxtaposition of textures, pushes them elsewhere. These are violently material objects. Aesthetically inviting works that constantly refuse. Their occasionally diminutive scale belies the world-building that is going on here. The variety of visual languages that surfaced and the conflicting message of the work’s language, some of which is culled from religious text and self-help literature, too refuse a dismissal. There’s scrappy DIY energy embodied here, but like the best of that work, Halpern’s is commanding, almost aggressive in its imperfection. The hapticity of their textiles channels the intimacy the digitally rendered images lack while lending a degree of depth impossible online.
Halpern is utterly attentive to their work’s display, extending to the ways in which several works are mounted using miniature dice buttons (loaded symbols themselves) and scrunchy-covered nails.
Good art ought to be legible but with a difference. The ability to transform the raw material of everyday life, especially in the Internet era, into aesthetic objects that are both pleasurable and confrontational, while refusing easy answers is rare.
By embedding the blurred lines between human and machine in the means of production, Halpern proposes one powerful mode of reading. The complexity of material and technique in their works’ weave matches the diversity of readings available in the visually complex language Halpern is developing.
“Tali Halpern: (star)E Eyed” is on view at Twelve Ten Gallery, 1210 West Thorndale, through October 26.
