Dreams of a Common Language

Overlap Gallery and Project Space, Newport, RI • overlapnewport.com • Through June 15, 2024

Overlap is a dynamic new gallery located just outside downtown Newport in a refurbished glass shop. Co-directed by artists Susan Matthews and Alicia Renadette, Overlap is committed to showcasing work that highlights rigor in craft, creating a space for underrepresented art that features textiles, installations, and other material investigations often spilling off the wall. Their upcoming exhibition Dreams of a Common Language promises a unique interpretation of fiber arts which will continue to push the gallery into the forefront of Rhode Island’s art scene. 

The exhibition features three Rhode Island-based artists and educators. Lu Heintz, Elizabeth Duffy, and Anna McNeary are united in their explorations of
gender, craft, and identity through textiles, installation, and performance. Dreams of a Common Language takes its name from an Adrienne Rich collection of poetry from which the three artists have taken to sending excerpts to each other as a grounding, meditative practice. 

Meticulous in craft, Duffy studies the cyclical nature of clothing through her current project Wearing. This series involves her carefully unwinding braided scrap rugs, ironing and patchworking tattered scraps, and metamorphosing them into garments and wall hangings. The works often remain tethered to the placental mass of the original rug, disrupting their use as either clothing or rug.

Tethering and transformation are reflected in McNeary’s performative works. She explores the vulnerability of social intimacy through modular clothing that links together participants. Additionally, McNeary utilizes screen printed textiles featuring repeated words such as “certainty,” “now,” and “never” to create quilt style wall hangings where words become abstracted. Like the connective clothing, the words undulate in and out of recognition and blur their function as statement or pattern. 

Heintz continues the themes of transfiguration in her installation Habitus, a whimsical display of furniture and household objects. Closer inspection will reveal an organ-like plushie slouching in the chair, a red stocking dangling seductively off of a coat stand turned foot, and other bodily mirages that hint these objects may be anthropomorphizing.

The works of Duffy, McNeary, and Heintz are playful, transformative, and reject the language of object, artwork, and entity. 

— Eleanor Q. C. Olson