Textile Exhibition Responds to Artificial Intelligence
Published on 17 April 2024
Petite Miniature Textiles returns to the Wangaratta Art Gallery. The popular biennial exhibition of small-scale textile art works opens on Friday 3 May from 5.30pm.
This year the works have been selected by Guest Curator, artist, and previous Petite exhibitor Susie Losch, along with Wangaratta Art Gallery Director Rachel Arndt. Thirty works have been selected from hundreds of entries, responding to the theme 'of the times'. Topics such as mass production, war, and the recent climate activist attacks on irreplaceable artworks are explored, and questions are raised as to how widespread access to artificial intelligence may affect the arts.
Showcasing innovative textile practice from across Australia, Petite is an important part of the gallery’s exhibition program. Wangaratta Art Gallery has a particular emphasis on textile art. This is realised through the development of its collection, exhibition program, and its presentation of the most significant acquisitive prize for textile art in Australia, the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award. This focus echoes the importance of textiles to the history of Wangaratta and the continuing textile story.
Janita Ryan is one of several artists in the exhibition who have contemplated the extensive use of artificial intelligence as part of her work. Her artwork which resembles a postcard, is based on an AI generated image of her ideal holiday. Ryan says that her work:
May be of a miniature landscape, a time-consuming petite embroidery, a postcard unsuitable for postage, but the conversations it sparked, [stitching on public transport], were grand and wide as commuters discussed the very real threats to our times.
Artist Laura Canty also questions how artificial intelligence may be used in creative pursuit:
I cheekily submitted the prompt words “Artificial Intelligence” into the AI text-to-image website Stable Diffusion, as I was interested in creating a pertinent design which would act as a template for my embroidery, but also to examine how AI represents itself.
Canty subsequently created a detailed embroidery based on this image. The results are spectacular, colourful and dynamic, yet more like the computer-generated imagery of 80s and 90s video games such as SimCity.
Wangaratta Art Gallery Director, Rachel Arndt notes:
The artists in Petite 2024 provoke conversations on uncomfortable social issues, all with the hope of a better world. They use AI to explore creativity, practice and process, and its implications there on. They address the unease of a world at war, the chaos, anxiety and uncertainty, with a persistent yearning for peace. They look to past generations and textile traditions to inform future attitudes and burgeoning technique, some with nostalgia, others with reverence. Mass production, current affairs, slow craft, and a bit of everyday life thrown in.
The exhibition has a following across the country and Wangaratta Art Gallery is one of only a few galleries internationally to hold such an event every two years. Works have been selected for their articulation of contemporary issues and ideas, combined with the quality of execution, mastery of technique, and the artist's interpretation of the term miniature (in this case 25 x 25 x 25cm or smaller).
Petite 2024 will be opened by Melbourne-based fashion designer Tara Whalley, at the opening reception on Friday 3 May from 5.30pm at Wangaratta Art Gallery. The exhibition continues until 23 June 2024.
The launch will also celebrate Shadow Murmurs, an exhibition of drawings and sculpture by Julie Monro-Allison presented in Gallery 2.
Petite Miniature Textiles 2024 is open to the public from 27 April - 23 June 2024 in Gallery 1, Wangaratta Art Gallery, located at 56 Ovens Street, Wangaratta. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Sunday, 10am - 4pm.