The opening reception for Art Quilts XIV:  Significant Stitching is Friday, November 20, from 7-9 p.m. at the Chandler Center for the Arts, 250 N. Arizona Ave., Chandler, Arizona . Music will be provided by jazz musician Pete Pancrazi.  The exhibit runs November 20, 2009 – January 2, 2010.  Here is a list of all the artists in the exhibit.

Gallery hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and Saturday, noon-4 p.m. In addition, Chandler Center for the Arts patrons enjoy the works before shows and during intermissions.  Call 480.917.6859 for holiday hours.

My artwork subverts the theme as all the stitching, by hand, can only be seen on the back.  The stitching can’t be seen on the front due to layers and layers of screen printing, mainly in metallic paint.  The artwork is my commentary on over-consumerism and waste:

How can we sustain an environment in which Tyvek lab jackets are worn once in a sterile environment and then discarded?  Squares cut from just such a jacket were painted in delicate earth colors, hand-quilted to hand-dyed cotton and then buried beneath layers upon layers of screenprinted paint. Consider all that time spent in hand-stitching which will never be seen except from the back. It’s a small sacrifice made to call attention how the glittery surface of our consumer society hides an ugly truth: our failure to embrace a time-consuming commitment to reduce, reuse, recycle.

You can see the hand stitching on the underlayer in progress of this artwork (when I thought it would be called Discarded) here.