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Regina Durante Jestrow Finds Art in Cutting, Saving, and Stitching Fabric
We may easily think that painting always begins with a canvas and some paint. Regina Durante Jestrow’s, however, might begin with a thrifted shirt, a saved scrap, or a pair of leopard-print capris. You could then say Jestrow paints with fabric, but that only tells half the story.
The works in “Strips, Stripes, Pieces, Parts,” Jestrow’s new exhibition at Ivester Contemporary, are made from hand-dyed, painted, collected, and repurposed fabrics. From a distance, her pieces look almost effortless. Stripes cross stripes, triangles repeat, colors settle into grids and geometric rhythms. But come closer, and that neatness starts to fade.
On first glance, Painting 14 (Log Cabin) reads as a large geometric abstraction, with its repetitions and shifting blocks of color easily entering into conversation with modernist painting. Upon further inspection, the large picture starts to resolve into smaller events: a stitch, an exposed edge, a change in texture, one fabric ending where another begins. Moving between those two modes of looking offers a dynamic way to experience the exhibition as a whole. What first appears to be an abstract composition turns out to contain records of artistic labor, bodily handling, and encounters between textiles.
Regina Durante Jestrow, Painting 14 (Log Cabin) Credit: Regina Durante Jestrow
That visibility of labor matters here. The slow, process-driven handwork we see in Jestrow’s pieces belongs to a long history of textile practices often associated with women’s labor. Feminist artists have long challenged the marginalization of materials and labor-intensive practices associated with domesticity, decoration, and women’s often invisible work. In Jestrow’s hands, that labor does not remain hidden behind the finished product; its traces appear on the surface.
But artistic labor is not the only history these surfaces hold. The fabrics themselves arrive with pasts of their own. Jestrow works with materials that are worn, thrifted, collected, saved, and remade. The most unexpected example may be hiding in the materials list for Pieced Landscape 69 (Green Leopard Capris). Alongside hand-dyed cotton, felt, and thread, Jestrow uses remnants of green leopard-print capri pants.
It’s hard not to pause there. Before becoming part of an artwork, imagine those capris once belonged to the wonderfully ordinary world of clothes, closets, shopping, wearing, and eventually not wearing. In a consumer culture that constantly imposes ideas of value and usefulness, telling us to replace what is no longer new, fashionable, desirable, or useful, holding onto an old or discarded piece of fabric and repurposing it can become a small refusal. Here the capris enter a different economy of value shaped by artistic attention, labor, imagination, and transformation. In Pieced Landscape 68 (Last of the Gold Roses), Jestrow combines repurposed damask and lace, keeping those earlier lives particularly unerased. Here too, what was once part of another object or another context enters the artwork without fully surrendering where it came from. Sometimes, as with the capris, she even keeps those histories in the title.
Regina Durante Jestrow, Spiderweb Variation 2 (VSC) Credit: Regina Durante Jestrow
Once all these different materials meet, Jestrow’s piecing and stitching begins to share something with the logic of collage. She cuts things apart and places them into relationships that didn’t exist before. Patterned fabric beside hand-dyed cotton. Gleaming lamé among softer textiles. A printed surface interrupted by a strict geometric strip. Part of the pleasure here comes from seeing that these elements never completely give up their individual qualities. A collage doesn’t need its fragments to agree with one another. Quite the opposite, it creates something new precisely through juxtaposition of differences.
Jestrow’s practice troubles several common hierarchies of value at once: the new over the reused, the useful over the discarded, and the seamless finished product over something that reveals the physical work and process of making. Perhaps that is where the feminist possibility of Jestrow’s art becomes most evident. Both the discarded fabric and the work of sewing it have been assigned historic value – one by a culture of consumption, the other by hierarchies that have long separated art from craft and women’s domestic labor. Jestrow assigns new value to both.
The exhibition gives us a playful moment to rethink those values and ask what kind of usefulness should determine what deserves to be kept, transformed, or taken seriously. Maybe “worn out” is not always the end of the story.
Strips, Stripes, Pieces, Parts Ivester Contemporary Through October 17The post Regina Durante Jestrow Finds Art in Cutting, Saving, and Stitching Fabric appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.