I think of knitting as a structural language akin to handwriting. It is an action, a performance that births a sculpture.

Time is no object for Connie Harris. Her new presentation at Gallery 555 takes advantage of the huge space and natural light with several large-scale sculptures and a handful of similarly large paintings, all of which required innumerable hours over the course of months, with much risk of repetitive stress injury, to create.

Five years ago Harris was producing mainly two-dimensional works on canvas, embedding tiny, glittery, synthetic jewels into a solid-color base layer of paint to create a nuanced, ethereal effect—sometimes earthy, sometimes glammy, but always with a slight touch of contrivance, a subtle and deliberate artificiality, derived partly from the plastic-based glitter and partly from the near-invisibility of the painter’s hand in the finished work. Since then Harris has expanded into the third dimension, and while her new pieces still pose questions of artificiality and prettiness, they are all obviously, overtly handmade. Most of the sculptural works in this presentation involve knitting of some kind, either in the traditional way with yarn, or in a more industrial (and unimaginably hand-punishing) way with copper wire, inspired in part by the knitted paintings of Rosemarie Trockel and the wire crochet work of Ruth Asawa.

Harris stuffs her yarn-knitted pieces inside clear, zippered, plastic pouches that simulate upholstery covers à la My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Their allusions are many and wide ranging, the most obvious being, of course, the 1950s and ‘60s middle-class domestic couch-shrine. They also make a sort of feminist commentary, as does any work that involves sewing. But they are really about beauty. Not just the beauty of the material (the shininess of the wire, the supersaturated hues of the yarn) but also a specifically feminine approach to beauty maintenance—the attempt to combat age and the elements and the ravages of time through a hundred hairbrush strokes a day, or whatever the current popular time- and work-intensive bodily preservation regime might be. The yarn in The Woolies, a row of vertical pouches, is sagging lower and lower each week in response to gravity’s inexorable pull, leaving a telltale gap at the top that begs for a little Botox. And Shopping, a stack of Styrofoam-stuffed plastic pillows wittily situated next to the atrium’s artificial bamboo, lists alarmingly to one side like a woman teetering in her high heels.

Harris does her copper-wire knitting with four-foot-long custom needles, which allow her to produce pieces equally wide. To make Counting Time she joined multiple swaths of metallic “cloth” into even larger sheets and hung them from the ceiling, creating a fantastic, layered waterfall effect that glitters in the afternoon sun. And to make Unraveled, the ultimate disavowal of all her hours of hand-lacerating work, she unraveled yards of copper knitting into a cloudlike mass of what looks like Rapunzel’s hair. There is an element of gleeful destruction in Unraveled, like a small child’s perverse interest in undoing things. The piece recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing or Ann Hamilton’s book-erasing performance pieces but it is much more playful, and certainly in the end much more beautiful, than either of those antecedents.

Exhibition curator Carin Adams reads Harris’s knitted sculptures as a kind of graphology, and it is true that Harris is deeply interested in writing as art. The several large paintings in this show are composed entirely of painted words, but they are illegible; their numerous layers in multiple colors, rotated around and around, add up to a completely abstract pattern. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Harris’s writing is like knitting, rather than that her knitting is like writing.

—Lindsey Westbrook, Artweek, May 2007

Photos by Marion Gray, and MaxImage