Room-A-Loom at Swimming Pool Project Space
by Claire Haasl
The Room-A-Loom from below
The Swimming Pool Project Space in Albany Park doesn’t have much of a shallow end. It’s definitely the kind of place where you dive right in. I visited it last weekend to witness Julia Sherman’s recent work, Room-A Loom, in action. Room-A Loom is a multi-city project where an enormous loom is installed into a gallery to reflect its actual dimensions and space. Looms have been installed first in Los Angeles at Workspace, and then in galleries in Philadelphia, Portland,Seattle, Vancouver, Nashville and Chicago’s Swimming Pool Project Space. Basically this environmental loom, as Sherman calls it, is a reflection of the gallery’s architecture and its patrons, especially where the Swimming Pool is concerned. Those who came to weave on the looms were asked to bring in their own materials to weave with. Things like plastic bags and computer cables, burlap sack and old clothes, plants and raw wool have been used in the past, but the Swimming Pool added a rule of their own and asked contributors to only bring in items that were blue, any shade of blue. In this way Swimming Pool’s Room-A Loom mirrors the total environment, including their bright blue floor.
A participant working on the Room-A-Loom
Weaving is such an ancient trade, but I really enjoyed this site-specific spin that Sherman has put on it. By making it such a collaborative experience Sherman has contemporized weaving, and maybe even more importantly, removed its stereotype of being only a craft while highlighting it as an art form. For my addition to Room-A Loom I chose a few lengths of an old sheet. Side note: I have never done any weaving on a loom before and it was very easy to learn but because of its size you had to have a partner to help you separate the loom. I thought this was fantastic, because too often art is made alone somewhere in an artist’s studio. What’s more, while I was weaving I really had to get under the loom, and looking up at it from the floor I had the feeling of being submerged in the lives of the other partners I had in creating this piece of art. I pictured the people that had already added objects and materials. I thought about who they might be and where they wore that navy blue sweater, what their day might have been like when they bought that light blue sheet set, and where on earth they found aqua blue tinsel. In my opinion anytime that art can produce the kinds of thoughts and the feelings I had in a viewer or a participant, it’s a success.
The Room-A-Loom from above
Having seen only one of the Room-A Looms, I can only imagine what a room of looms might look like and make me feel like. I can tell you, though, it gets me excited just thinking about it.
What’s next for the Swimming Pool? This Saturday, February 27 After, Before an exhibition that “subtly bends the space time continuum by making the future seem like the present or even the past,” opens from 7-10. Again, not something you can really wade into, but believe me when I say, “come on in the water’s warm.”
