An Errant Line: Ann Hamilton / Cynthia Schira

An Errant Line represents a mutual engagement with cloth that artists Ann Hamilton and Cynthia Schira have had over several decades. As the artists delved into the Spencer Museum's extensive collections, they considered how unique access to these pieces might become material for their own work. Schira incorporates abstracted imagery into textiles woven on computer-controlled looms, and drapes an entire gallery wall with a monumental word cloth, which inventively catalogues ways of describing cloth. In Ann Hamilton's work, the miniature is rendered gigantic, with small, 18th-century nativity figures from the Spencer's collection transformed, through the lens of an obsolete scanner and digital enlargement and printing processes, into large-scale prints.