Artist Maris Van Vlack has a new exhibition nTime Warp on display at Superhouse, a gallery in New York City. Featuring Van Vlack’s woven works, Time Warp is commentary on the built environments that we live in today. Van Vlack uses her medium to tell a delicate story about physical space and the spaces we inhabit, bringing life to the buildings and structures that make up our every day lives, but often look lifeless.

Fiber art, which has finally been more accepted within the fine art community, features organic materials and threads. In addition to sustainability when it comes to material, weaving also opens the door for ethically made art as a more common practice. There are a variety of techniques for creating fiber art, many sustainable. The most popular practices are weaving, embroidery, knitting, and quilting. Through these techniques, fiber artists like Van Vlack are able to create work that is made with sustainable textiles and ensure low energy manufacturing and recycling are active within their artistic process. Van Vlack uses techniques like handweaving, hand stitching, and jacquard weaving to produce her work, using mixed fibers, rope, and paint as her materials. 

The crumbling settings within her pieces act as timestamps for the naturalistic settings they are placed in. Although these settings are coming undone, they are set upon a brightly colored backgrounds, adding a surreal beauty to these sights. Her pieces feel like commentary on the current cultural and social landscape – society may be crumbling, but the world around us still offers us beautiful visual gifts. In Facade, you can see different houses and concrete walls crumbling, with daunting faces in the middle. 
Time Warp is Van Vlack’s first solo exhibition in New York. The artist drew from family histories when creating her pieces, as well as architectural landscapes from various areas in New England that have colonial and classic structural styles. The hand woven pieces showcase Van Vlack’s view of these structures, with each stitch featuring an intentional intersection and color choice – the works tell Van Vlack’s very particular story.

In creating these works, the artist mimicked the same process it took to build the same  New England structures featured in her pieces. Van Vlack layers one thread at a time, like the process of laying bricks and stone over a foundation, then paints over the surface, putting her own spin on the threads as they come together. 

Using buildings and architecture as a focus point, Van Vlack explores how manmade landscapes serve as physical storytellers and placeholders for modern history. As we watch these extremely physical spaces change, fade and deteriorate over time, we see how environments – both manmade and natural – continue to evolve, with or without our intervention. And as in Van Vlack’s work, there’s beauty in the changes and destruction. 

‘Time Warp’ is on view now through October 19 at Superhouse in New York City.