Elaine Reichek, Artemisia Gentileschi Robe, 2020, digital embroidery on linen, 13 1⁄2 × 12".
Elaine Reichek’s “Frock-Conscious” further developed “Material Girl,” her 2022 show at New York’s Marinaro gallery. The mini survey in Los Angeles—featuring some fifty works, the majority of which were made over the past five years—emphasized her long-standing interest in the history of textiles and the presumptive gendering of their makers and wearers alike. For this outing, Reichek took a cue from The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1915–41), citing this passage from the work in the accompanying checklist: “My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness, &c.” The installation here cohered around twenty-four linen panels centering on richly colored digital or hand-embroidered sections of garments taken from paintings, drawings, and sundry designs, including a drapery study by Michelangelo; the deep golden folds of the dress worn by Artemisia Gentileschi’s subject in Conversion of the Magdalene, ca. 1620; the winsome rainbow bands covering the chemise of Henri Rousseau’s supine protagonist in The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897; and the pulsating pinstripes of a pair of skintight pants sported by a leather man in Ed Paschke’s Sunburn, 1970. Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Gallery), 2016, was the most recent citation. Its depiction of a woman before a white wall of framed images was recapitulated by Reichek as a vertical diptych of pattern atop pattern: The subject’s tessellated shirt wryly quotes Jasper Johns’s crosshatches, and her verdant, leaf-printed skirt comes courtesy of Rousseau’s unreal phytology.
