Teotitlan del Valle
Michael Rohde
2020
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Michael F. Rohde has been weaving since 1973. His formal training in drawing, color and design was at the Alfred Glassel School of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Throughout his career he has led workshops and lectures, served as a juror, organized exhibitions, and exhibited his works in many local, national, and international juried and invited shows.
Recently his work has been included in the United States Department of State Art in Embassies Program, and exhibited at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, the American Craft Museum in New York, the invitational Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz, Poland, galleries in Lausanne and Beijing (twice), a solo exhibit at the Janina Monkute-Marks Museum in Lithuania, and an exhibition at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park in San Diego. His work is in the permanent collections of the Textile Museum (Washington, DC), the Mingei, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the Ventura County Museum of Art, the Racine Art Museum and The Art Institute of Chicago.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Working from a snapshot of a wall and window in Teotitlan del Valle, the colors that were juxtaposed were striking, and in the tapestry, they were reduced to color and value blocks.
The medium in which I choose to work is fiber, primarily flat woven pieces. I’ve picked this less-than-common medium, having been drawn to the possibilities of relationships between subliminal texture and the interaction of light and color.
Having taken this route, the weavings can become an embodiment of the freedom to explore how colors relate to each other and to the surface properties of the fibers used. Pure color and specific combinations of color have the power to speak to each of us, often producing differing responses in each person. By limiting the vocabulary to color and woven texture, the works are better able to stimulate reactions and emotions that these raw color and spatial relationships can have on the viewer.
Recent pieces of work over the last several years have addressed the impact of human and natural causes on the homes and lives of people. These include houses that disappear into the sands of war, are filled with rising flood waters, or simply vanish as the natural consequence of time. The most recent work is a group of tapestry woven pixelated faces, touching on abstraction and reality at the same time.
Yet, without the foreknowledge of what is behind the creation of these images, the works stand as objects of quiet beauty: begun with white yarns of wool, silk, linen and other fibers, I add my own dyes to achieve a range of colors and contrast not available in commercially dyed materials. Like a painter, I mix my own colors to create something new.
MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES
Wool, natural dyes.
Handwoven tapestry.