Amy Honchell: Soft Infrastructure

Reception: Tuesday, August 23, 2011  6-9pm

Exhibition: July 13-October 3, 2011

Here at Lula we are excited to get the chance to have a solo show featuring the new work Amy Honchell titled Soft Infrastructure.  This work reveals a soft landscape—created from layers of cloth that are stitched into strata—supporting traces of failed (hard) architecture—dilapidated mining structures, hunting blinds, and communication towers. The improbable, rickety structures stand in opposition to the soft landscape that provides support to them.

Blind, Muscle Memory (detail), 2011

Topology, sewing, and elements of mapping underscore the parallels between the structures and functions of the human body, architecture, and the landscape. Honchell invites viewers to cross unseen boundaries and discover new territories while exploring the sense of touch in a visual way. 

The work in Soft Infrastructure explores memory, navigation, and landscape. Honchell was raised in a section of northeastern Pennsylvania known at the Endless Mountains. The small coal mining towns along the mountains in this area are not particularly notable but traveling through them shaped her. The bends and turns of the roads and rivers are etched into her memory as physical sensations, stories, and imagined adventures. 

Signaling Point (Red Tower), 2010-11

Her work embodies the idea that drawing is an extension of touch, the hand. Whatever the medium for drawing—pen, thread, wire—Honchell thinks about the haptic gestures made and recorded on, in, and through a surface. For the past year she has been engaged in studio investigations of drawing in this vein that that attempt to invert notions of soft and hard, fixed and malleable, structure and collapse.

Rickety Structure X, 2010