Rummages: an Installation by Textile Artist Susie Brandt

The Design Center at Philadelphia University presents Rummage, an installation by textile artist Susie Brandt.

The exhibition will run from January 24 - April 9, 2008 in The Design Center's 1950s California-style ranch house in East Falls, Philadelphia.

Brandt, given free range to pick and choose from The Design Center's historic textile collection of over 200,000 artifacts, plays with relationships conceived between the old and the contemporary.

Rummage is, at once, a conversation among Brandt's contemporary work and the collection pieces; a retrospective of her work of the past 20-plus years; and an archeological dig that tracks Brandt's pieces back to their textile roots.

"There's a vitality found in the historic textiles that I aim to connect to my own work," Brandt says.

"The old pieces serve as a muse, rekindling the dialogue between my work and the past."

In one conversation, for instance, Brandt compares "Dainty" - a bedcovering comprised of a huge variety of laces fused into a single complex field of texture - with a 1960s couture ensemble fabricated from a looped and hand-stitched lace-like braid.

Throughout the collection are piles of swatches that were used in the design, production and distribution of Philadelphia's textile industry.

Now housed in drawers and on shelves throughout the house, the sedimentation of these piles will be seized and reinterpreted as an installation in the ranch house's pantry.

more: philau.edu/designcenter/exhibitions/Rummage/index. (342)

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