Museu de Arte de São Paulo / KMEC
Review by David Starkey
Webbed Skies is the monograph accompanying a recent exhibition of Melissa Cody’s weavings at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 space in Queens. As such, it carries a bit of the magic of that spectacular show. At PS1, Cody’s work, made on a traditional Diné/Navajo loom constructed by her father and brother, fairly exploded off the white walls on which they were hung.
In “Lightning Storm,” for example, the jagged blue and black lightning bolt contrasts sharply with the fiery orange and red spaces in between the zigs and zags. The aniline dyed wool shows up all the more vividly in juxtaposition with the undyed wool on the right. This interruption of a striking pattern with visual blank space occurs in a number of Cody’s weavings, disrupting expectations and forcing viewers to pause and rethink what exactly it is that they are seeing.
In her Webbed Skies essay “In the Spider Woman’s Thread,” Isabella Rjeille notes that “According to the Diné/Navajo cosmovision, the loom is a representative of the universe: the top bar represents the sky and the bottom one, the earth. The tension that holds its threads together is symbolized by thunder, which, in turn strikes a connection between the celestial and earthly worlds.” A fourth-generation weaver, Cody is very aware of the tension not only between heaven and earth, but also between past and the present, the Diné/Navajo world and that of the white invaders, and the handmade and the industrial.
In regard to the latter dichotomy, Cody “primarily engages with the Germantown Revival movement, which emerged after a tragic period known as the Long Walk (1863-1868),” in which “the US military burned homes, damaged fields, and killed livestock, forcing over 10,000 people to migrate hundreds of miles.” Along the way, the Diné/Navajo were given commercially produced blankets from Germantown, Pennsylvania, which introduced the traditional weavers to “synthetic colors [and] opened new horizons of experimentation.”
The monograph makes clear that earlier Diné/Navajo weavers were inventive, resourceful and open to new ideas, and Cody continues that tradition by commenting on a world that is much different than the one in which the first weavers thrived.
While her weavings generally address serious subject matter, Cody is not without a sense of humor, which is probably best shown in a small piece entitled I Am Navajo Barbie. In the lower left corner is an impish figure wearing a rainbow dress. Above her is a “whirling log,” a symbol that looks like a swastika, but in Diné/Navajo culture represents prosperity and luck. On the right, the words “Navajo” and “Barbie” are separated by a rainbow-colored electric cord.
On the somber side, in “Deep Brain Stimulation,” Cody addresses her father’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease, creating “a central radial effect, referencing a surgical procedure that uses continuous pulses of electric current to create new neural pathways.” It’s a heartbreaking conceit, but the result is a lovely piece of art, one in which the suffering of Parkinson’s is transformed into a vibrating world of colors.
Art books are generally expensive, and readers expect them to be big and beautiful. At seven by ten inches, Webbed Skies is fairly small, and while the color of the reproductions is good, it’s not great. And of course the small space in which the work is reproduced doesn’t come close to suggesting the majesty of the weavings–Walking Off No Water Mesa is eleven feet in length. (The small, faint font in which the four shortish but informative essays are printed doesn’t help matters.)
Nevertheless, it’s nice to have a record, even an imperfect one, of this powerful artist’s work. If nothing else, the book’s shortcomings should inspire readers to visit Cody’s next show.
