Systems & Mythologies catalog essay
Two for One
Zoe Stillpass
When Mark Barrow and Sarah Parke were students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 2000s, the two aesthetic theories that had dominated the second half of the previous century appeared threadbare. For many artists and thinkers, the entrenched ideological positions of modernism and postmodernism both lacked strength of conviction. In fundamental ways, one was antithetical to the other. To take a generalized version of each, modernism was founded in the physical sensations of a medium, and a modernist work of art depended on its physical properties alone, rather than any connotative meaning. Postmodernism, on the other hand, maintained that art was a socially constructed product, grounded in the rules and categories of human understanding, in systems such as history, language, and economics. Barrow Parke were not convinced that either of these positions was universally true. With no clear-cut alternative to these theories, the way forward seemed uncertain. The situation begged the question of whether art had gone as far as it could. Of this apparent dichotomy, Barrow stated: “I think if you don’t view Postmodernism as a complete negation of Modernism, but as an extension of it, then there are a lot of possibilities. By reintroducing subject matter and coding everything with meaning, Postmodernism created many ways to make something new. In our current hyper-networked culture, where everything is fluid and there are fewer boundaries, there is even more potential for new perspectives.”[1] Accordingly, to overlay seemingly mutually exclusive systems onto one another to create something new became the principal aim of their practice.
While an MFA student at Yale, Barrow was strongly attracted to minimalism. At this time, he painted PM (2006), an early abstract work particularly influenced by Agnes Martin. He was interested in the way her phenomenological method rendered touch visible through the various ways the lines responded to the weave of the canvas. Barrow realized that behind Martin’s grid was another grid, that of the warp and weft of the canvas. For PM, he decided to trace the individual grains of the linen canvas with his pencil. In so doing, he followed a minimalist impulse of seeking to close the gap between figure and ground and reduce the composition to its most basic elements. This process diminished the representational and illusionistic aspects of the works, thereby placing them in the lineage of what Donald Judd termed “specific objects.” The marks of his pencil and the gridded canvas, while separate components—the first, diachronous and contingent, and the second, synchronous and structural—came together to produce a fixed and distinct sensation.
After graduation and moving to New York, he continued to make paintings by tracing or connecting the grains of linen with small specks of paint. Barrow realized that the properties of store-bought fabrics were extremely limited for his purposes. All of their structures were the same—a plain weave of over under, over under. And so, he asked Parke to begin weaving fabrics for his paintings. The two had been dating since their undergraduate days at RISD, where Parke had majored in textiles. In the beginning, Parke’s fabrics were meant to look similar in color to plain linen. However, they were twills—weave structures in which threads pass over or under more than one thread to create offset, diagonal patterns. These fabrics were more tactile than the standard ones, and their more complicated structure became apparent when they were painted. Graft (2008) and VEN (2010) were two of the first paintings for which Parke wove. The artists chose the title Graft because it felt like they were grafting a painting onto a weaving. The title VEN referred to a Venn diagram, another form of overlapping. Both titles put forward the idea of two diverse entities commingling to form one.
For these works, Barrow stretched Parke’s fabric, which then served as a map. He applied paint with a brush as tiny as a single piece of thread to apply dots of colored acrylic to the picks of Parke’s textile. A pick is a single weft thread that goes either under or over the warp threads. The paints were all different colors. The compositions were just straight lines intersecting to make different “planes,” surfaces that the individual points of color emphasized. Merging the paintings with their armatures further reduced the distinction between figure and ground, thus, enhancing the autonomy of the whole. It would be difficult to find a precedent for this particular way of combining weaving and painting.
This process is painstaking and time-consuming both for Parke, as she handweaves the textiles on a loom, and for Barrow, as he meticulously stipples the numerous picks of the fabric. Around 2011, as can be seen, for example, in the work AES (2011), Parke’s textiles had become increasingly intricate. At about this time, the artists realized that the qualities of the weaving had moved to the forefront and were no longer merely a subordinate element in the work. As the weavings became more complicated, the nature of their collaboration changed. Parke was no longer just making fabrics for Barrow to paint on. Her weaving was in many ways driving the practice. Barrow had now stopped using them as a map, and his painting became more of a response to Parke’s textiles. A loom was added to the studio, so that the artists could work and spend time together in the same space. At this point, the systems of weaving and painting began to interact in a complex nonlinear dynamic feedback loop. The couple had entered into an all-out collaboration of equal partners. Their works, which had been credited as by Mark Barrow with textile by Sarah Parke, were by 2013 billed as Mark Barrow and Sarah Parke (later shortened to just Barrow Parke). To be sure, this process played a catalytic role in binding Barrow and Parke’s professional and personal relationships.
The merger of the medium of painting with that of weaving obviously calls forth the dichotomous distinctions between high art and craft and male and female work. But these connotations are secondary concerns for Barrow Parke; their real interest lies in the beauty of the logic of weaving. In this vein, the artists have spoken of their conviction that weaving played a foundational role in the emergence of abstract thinking, leading directly to the development of geometry, architectural technology, and digitalization. The logistical order of Parke’s lush fabrics and the sensuous qualities of Barrow’s mechanically applied colored dots each and together overcome the rigid polarities of gender. Concomitantly, they transcend the separation of mind and matter.
While working on AES, Barrow and Parke began research into the perceptual phenomenon of synesthesia. They felt that this neurological condition, where certain people conflate multiple senses, for example, “seeing” music and “hearing” color, offered an appropriate metaphor for their practice. In combining weaving with painting, they link colors, shapes, and textures. They transform the numeric logic of weaving into colored threads and the colored threads then become specks of paint. AES manifests this sensory cross talk where the distinctions between numbers, colors, shapes, weaving pick, and brushstroke blur and break down into zones of indiscernibility. These synesthetic effects, intensified forms of affective perception, disrupt conventional perception, and challenge our established ways of understanding and experiencing the world.
Barrow Parke’s work has frequently conflated the technologies of weaving and digitalization. To be sure, it is often recounted how the loom anticipated the computer, the warp and weft constitute a binary that preceded the zeros and ones of digital code, and the weaving pick is a medieval ancestor of the pixel. Referencing this genealogy, many of Barrow Parke’s paintings resemble the punch cards used in the weaving process as well as in early computer programming. In addition, their weaving draft patterns that indicate picks in a pixelated notational grid call to mind raster graphics. Procedurally, too, Barrow Parke combine the two, the older and newer technologies. They almost always design their patterns on the computer and translate the pixels on the screen into paint on the textile. The artists have also created many of their compositions by first drawing them with their fingers on an iPad or iPhone, after which an app converts the movements of their fingers into lines. The “digital”, which literally refers to the digits of the hand, can imply the physicality of touch while at the same time describing incorporeal information. Thus, again their works affirm feeling and thought, body and mind to be two aspects of the same experience.
While converting code into the tactile mode of the textile and then into the optical realm of painting, Barrow Parke often found interesting translation errors. Thereupon, they decided to destabilize the logic of the loom and relinquish their subjective preferences by opening up their method to nonlinear interchanges with outside systems. In a series of paintings that included AES, for example, they worked with number permutations generated by a computer program. For several of these works they assigned numbers to all the different colors of yarn they had in their studio and used a random number generator to choose eight of those numbers to determine the colors of yarn they would use on one of their eight-harness looms. In some works, they even used the generator to design the fabric patterns. Usually, with an eight-harness loom, the weaver threads yarn through each of the harnesses according to predetermined sequences of one to eight and steps on the eight pedals following the same sequences. For works such as AES, however, Barrow Parke let the computer program generate random sequences of one to eight that then dictated the order in which Parke would thread the yarn and step on the pedals. By introducing randomness into the rational system of weaving, Barrow Parke shattered all symmetry and allowed for complex, unpredictable patterns to emerge. In AES, for example, the textile never repeats itself. Through the interaction between artists and algorithms, a new entity self-organized into a cohesive whole.
For their “RGB” and “CMY” series begun around 2011, Barrow Parke further interlaced weaving and the digital through an exploration of color spaces. Advanced science and digital technology have made it possible to reduce colors into binary digits (bits) of information that can be measured, organized on a grid, and placed within a standardized system. Through these color spaces, numbers represent colors. For paintings GRB4 (2014) and RGB6 (2014), from this series, the artists played with color systems to create their version of a monochrome. To this end, they designed on the computer an abstract composition which Parke reproduced as a textile using only red, green, and blue thread. Barrow then used a thread-sized brush to apply black paint to parts of the textile, leaving different ratios of the three colors uncovered. They determined the ratios by the mathematical organization of the RGB color space of their image as displayed on the computer screen. The titles reference the order of the colored thread left uncovered from the largest to the smallest ratio. For example, in GRB4 the colors left visible progressively decrease from green to red to blue. The brush marks and picks can be regarded as equivalent not only to the bits but also to quarks and photons. The artists’ “white series” used the same method, but with cyan, magenta, and yellow thread and white paint. In both series, the paint applied to the colored threads creates different optical color mixtures. These paintings become analog versions of the RGB color models of digital screens or the CMY color model of digital printers.[2] Interlacing incompatible perceptual modes—that is, the RGB digital color model and the medium of painting, which traditionally uses the RYB subtractive color model to mix physical pigments—causes the logic of these systems to start to break down and gives way to shifts in color and form.
Barrow Parke’s window work GRB5 (2023) reflects upon the practice of weaving in a new light. For this stained-glass mosaic they applied red, green, blue, and black vinyl squares to the museum windows. Arranging the pixel-like squares in different configurations within a weaving draft, they created patterns within patterns. Both the RGB color model and the weaving draft function as two-axis graphs, or Cartesian planes. These grids, the preeminent modernist structure, describe a purely mental realm, one that exists prior to experience. However, they transpose this ideal space into the real space of the museum. As such, they contravene the notion of universal space with that of relational space. This disruption results in a kind of strange quantum phenomenon where a system can exist in multiple states, a combination of different possibilities. Here, RGB pixels—designed to create the illusion of light on computer screens—exist simultaneously as stained-glass windows, designed to diffuse real light. In the “RGB” and “CMY” series, the colors of the threads, dots of paint, and vinyl squares, interact through mathematical formulas to create interference patterns of overlapping waves. In these kaleidoscopic works, a “superposition” of digital and analog interfaces produces a moiré pattern with fringing colors and ghosting. This oscillation expresses a release of energy. It brings into view the idea that the image has an inside, a subjectivity. As in quantum physics, two contradictory explanations of reality are required to fully explain the phenomena of light, one based on particles, the other on waves. Neither theory by itself is sufficient.
Another concept from physics that serves as a metaphor for Barrow Parke’s work is entanglement. As physicist Karen Barad states:
To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.[3]
Barad emphasizes the interconnectedness underlying the fabric of the universe, a dynamic process of co-creation that aligns with Barrow Parke’s recent series of figurative paintings and drawings. In these works, the artists mix the language they’ve developed over the past ten years with imagery that has appeared repeatedly in crafts and textiles over thousands of years. For example, their painting The Universe (2023), contains patterns based on various creation myths.[4] The painting started with “the universe” spelled out using a font the artists invented based on imbricated pieces of circles, yet another type of overlapping. One section of the painting includes birds whose form replicates the over-under structure of the weaving. Other sections include different representations of the schematics used to weave the fabric—the numerical notation indicating which threads are raised, the weaving draft pattern, and the dots mapping the picks. The artists therefore conceived this painting as a totality, a universe encompassing parts with forms that recapitulate the formal properties of the universe as a whole, down to its smallest units. Images and narratives take shape through an interface between micro- and macro- worlds. This cosmic structure provides an apt metaphor for Barrow Parke’s abiding goal in their life and work: to create organic wholes, to make one from many.
Zoe Stillpass is a curator at the Centre Pompidou-Metz and a professor of art theory at the École Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne.
[1] Higgs, Matthew and Barrow, Mark. “Matthew Higgs and Mark Barrow in Conversation,” Redaction. Milan: Mousse, 2013, p. ?.
[2] A color model is a method used to reproduce any color according to a specific combination of colors from a limited set of colors.
[3] Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, p. ?.
[4] Notably, a myth is a type of metaphor that uses one thing to describe another thing.