Artist Talk Saturday, April 30th, 12pm The Front
“Soft Things: talking about fiber art.” This artist talk will give an overview of different techniques, materials, and language used to talk about fiber art, with the aim of providing clarity on the medium for artists, audiences, collectors, professors, and art professionals.
Jane Tardo is a fiber and mixed media artist born and based in New Orleans. Experimenting with many visual and physical techniques, their practice is surreal, wacky and diverse- incorporating sculpture, textile art, and technologies in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional works.
Tardo’s work has been exhibited both locally and nationally. In January 2022, they were awarded 2nd prize for Cat Island Adventure in Surreal Salon 14 at Baton Rouge Gallery. In October 2021, they showcased a mobile interactive performance installation: Haunted Hearse Snake Tube Adventure Ride. Tardo earned their MFA in Sculpture from the University of New Orleans in 2020. They served as a digital resident at Southern Heat Exchange and was a grant recipient of Colloqate Design. Their work has been written about in Antigravity Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Art News, and Pelican Bomb.
Jane Tardo’s work is a handmade exploration of alternative approaches to life created through their projects as an inventor, sculptor, and designer. Their work brings ever joyful solutions to daily troubles and creates absurd leisure activities to prompt reflection on the seams of reality and fantasy. Dream-like and unrestrained, Tardo’s Adventure Cattery Quilt Show and Boutique captures a fantasy world inspired by the perplexity of meaning and the ludicrousness of reality.
The utopic Adventure Cattery Quilt Show is a series of textile tapestries. Using applique, collage, and quilting techniques, this work centers around hope, companionship, the love of cats and nature. They are the ultimate, flowery, surreal fantasy escapist relationships with the people we want to be, the places we want to go, the days that aren’t too hot or too cold, where flowers are always in bloom, and there are no biting bugs.
Boutique prioritizes research and process. Tardo’s interactive, sculptural installation analyzes how trends, modern marketing, social media, and algorithms manipulate a perspective to the benefit of controlling the masses. In intricate sewn and machine embroidered packages, control is reclaimed with hands-on, persuasive communication and fool-proof branding techniques. Mimicking the promotional language, graphic style and overt optimism of modern marketing, the objects tune into what we are conditioned to want: products to help with intimacy, beauty, and control.