Abba Fine Art is pleased to present the fiber installation of artist Pip Brant September 13 through October 29, 2008. This exhibition features her projects, Blood Veil, and The Flying Carpet among others.

As a fiber style artist, Pip Brant use a plethora of found materials, everything from doilies, embroideries, table-cloths, vintage postcards and ordinary objects, that alters their original function. Art critic Eleanor Heartney writes that by Brant taking these elements out of context and altering them in “humorous and ironic ways she brings out the social and political messages embedded within them.” She turns these items into monstrous domestic parodies to create the Verfremdungeffekt or alienation effect of comedic use of materials and absurdist narrative.

Heartney explains that Brant’s use of “domestic materials and images, as well as processes like weaving and embroidery, echo the strategy of pioneering feminist artists like Miriam Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff, who were determined to demonstrate that traditional ‘women’s work’ offered a valid subject for art.”
In the interactive Blood Veil, Brant takes a large-scale red frame in the shape of a human head and covers it with delicate doilies crocheted together. The viewers are welcomed to walk around and inside the 8’ x 6’ foot in diameter structure.  In this work, Pip uses the red cage to represent oppression while the doilies epitomize the opposite. Brant explains that the reason she chose doilies is because they serve as a “metaphor for a kind of Valium of the old days.” She explains that when a person practices needlework, their mind can “travel.”

In the Flying Carpet Brant takes a traditional oriental rug and embroidered a map of Iraq. The interactive piece with taillights and parts from an American car is a protest to the war in Iraq suggesting that the war is “fueled” by oil.

Pip Brant has exhibited her work in the United States and abroad in Belfast, Ireland, Lithuania and London, England. Brant has been awarded the South Florida Cultural Consortium for Visual and Media Arts for Tabled Reports. Other awards include the Wyoming Arts Fellowship and funding from the New Forms Regional Initiative for Cattle/Text Interaction.
Brant attended the University of Montana where she earned her Bachelor of Arts and received her Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Wyoming. Brant grew up on the Western Plains Indian Reservations (Sioux, Cheyenne, Assiniboine) where the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Public Health employed her family. In 1999 Brant moved to Florida where she currently resides and is an associate professor in painting and drawing at Florida International University.

For further information about this exhibition or for a private viewing, please contact the gallery at (305) 576-4278 or via email at art@abbafineart.com.   For press inquiries and image requests please contact ABBA FINE ART.

About Abba Fine Art:
Abba Fine Art’s objective is to showcase samples of the diversity found in the creative flow of today’s contemporary art scene. The gallery stable includes works from artists that deal with different aesthetics as well as ideological dynamics. The subjects represent different aspects of life, ranging from the organic and natural to the psychological, figurative and pop culture references.