Portals.Portraits exhibition Musee de Toile de Jouy 7 February - 23 March 2025 Jouy-En-Josas, France

Toile de Jouy (translation: Fabric of Jouy) takes its name from the village, Jouy-en-Josas, near Versailles where the first printed textile factory in France was founded. Started by Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf (1738–1815), who was brought up in the textile industry, the factory began work in 1760. It attracted an affluent clientele, including Marie Antoinette, that appreciated the quality of Oberkampf’s fabrics.

I first tuned into toile de Jouy while living in a toile-inspired room while an artist-in-residence at Giverny in 2012, Claude Monet’s famed home and garden located not far from the Musee de Toile de Jouy. The toiles that I am most drawn to incorporate both figure and landscape. Idealized vignettes that float on a neutral ground, never quite touching each other, yet creating an overall rhythm.

The title for my exhibition, Portals.Portraits, refers to people in my life who have impacted me, and of whom I’ve created portraits (always in nature, when possible) incorporating toile and other fabrics.Mother Nature has always been a great influence on my work. In the Musée de Toile de Jouy, I show, for the first time, some large-format, purely landscape works.

I was born 1965 in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. The youngest of six children, I spent much time with my mother (Caroline Hailand, 1931-2025). We shared similar interests in art, music, theater, travel, and in making things. I would accompany her on trips to the local fabric store, where I watched her purchase yards of fabric, patterns, thread, buttons – then construct clothing out of them. She always encouraged me to draw, to be creative. My use of fabric later in life was influenced by these early childhood outings. I also dressed up in costumes my mother had created so I could put on shows on the family front lawn. Performance has always been key to my outlook, to my work.

The three largest works in the exhibition are also the newest. Two are pure landscape, and one is a self-portrait taken in a boat on one of the most famous, and oft-represented, bodies of water in all of art history: Claude Monet’s Nymphea pond in Giverny. He constructed this conceptual framework of a garden, which he then abstracted in large paintings. I’m drawn to mythology, in general. I incorporate, for instance, a “Diana and the Hunters” toile in a number of works. Landscape, like anything else, is a language. I enjoy combining these various visual languages.

The three large works I call Detritus Assemblages, were born out of the scraps of fabric I accumulated while creating my photo-on-toile works. Wanting to create from “the waste” in 2020 during lockdown, I sewed a bunch of these scraps together, trying to do it “blindly,” to not choose the order in which they were sewn (just taking them from a pile)—in other words, to not make any aesthetic choices.

The nine portraits are all of creative people. My mom, Caroline, starts the group, which includes well-known downtown New York performers Justin Vivienne Bond, Christeene, visual artists Jim Hodges, Lyle Ashton Harris, choreographer Damien Jalet, and creative movement director Stephen Galloway. The portrait of Demi Moore comes from a series of images she and I created together in 2015 in her backyard in Los Angeles. While partaking in an artist’s residency in Rotterdam in 2017, I revisited an image of Demi, and chose to combine her with a tree – loosely referencing Lucas Cranach, she and the tree becoming one. The works together at the Musee de Toile de Jouy function as a sort of magical garden, a place of pleasure and fantasy (and of course toile de Jouy). I’m honored to be able to display my works at the Musée de Toile de Jouy, the remarkable output of Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf’s factory, the originator of toile de Jouy.

I dedicate this show to my mother, Caroline, who gave me entrance to this world, and helped to open so many interesting doors…