There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes from standing in front of a Gabriel Dawe installation for the first time — the sense that a beam of solid, prismatic light has somehow been woven from thread and hung in the room you’re standing in. Dawe, a Mexican-Canadian artist based in Dallas, has spent more than a decade building sculptures entirely out of ordinary sewing thread: thousands of individual strands, tensioned taut from floor to ceiling or wall to wall, one at a time, until they resolve — from the right angle — into a smooth, glowing gradient that reads less like craft and more like captured sunlight.
The technique is deceptively simple and punishingly laborious. Dawe anchors each strand by hand, working alone for days or sometimes weeks on a single installation, building up the spectrum thread by thread the way a printer lays down ink in passes. The name of the ongoing series, Plexus — Latin for “braid” or “network” — is itself a nod to the webs of nerves and blood vessels the finished works visually echo. Every piece is built and dismantled specifically for its site, which means that unlike a painting, none of them exist anywhere in the world except in the moment you happen to be standing in front of one, and in the photographs afterward.
Via Colossal, a look at some of the colored thread installations Texas-based artist Gabriel Dawe completed over the previous year, all part of the Plexus body of work.
Dawe’s path from self-taught hobbyist to institutionally recognized artist is part of what makes the work so satisfying to follow. In 2015, his installation Plexus A1 filled the grand entry hall of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s newly renovated Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., as the centerpiece of the museum’s WONDER exhibition — a single work built from roughly 60 miles of embroidery thread that went on to become one of the most photographed pieces in the museum’s recent history, and that now sits in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. It’s a fitting arc for an artist whose earliest inspiration reportedly traces back to watching his grandmother embroider in Mexico City, and to the shafts of colored light in stained glass and science-fiction wormholes alike — a high-craft, high-concept synthesis that sits squarely at the intersection of our Craft & Making and Art coverage. Dawe himself has spoken about chasing an effect close to op art‘s optical precision, translated out of the flat canvas and into physical, walk-around space.
Dallas-based artist Gabriel Dawe (previously here and here) continues to add new entries to the Plexus series in museums and public spaces around the world. Photographs, even good ones, inevitably flatten what is fundamentally a spatial, almost architectural experience — standing beneath one of these works and watching the gradient shift and fracture as you move is about as close as most of us will get to walking through a rainbow. See much more, including his newer installations, on his website.
