This body of work emerged from a series of photographs of early cloth gas masks that I had been taking in European and American military history museums. I was struck by the haunting, almost ghoulish quality of these objects and their visual equivalence to other kinds of masks, hoods, costumes, and veils. I was also attracted to their handmade quality, which seemed to suggest simultaneously a level of loving care as well as functional inadequacy. I began to see these objects as remnants of an as-yet unwritten history of needlework. The repeated thought that “someone made this” compelled me to recreate many of the masks, and to expand my search to kindred forms found on the Internet. I used out-of-focus, poorly lit, and pixilated images as the source material for making my own, flawed “authentic reproductions,” using art supplies found at local fabric/craft retail stores and recycling centers. In my version, each accessory is plainly stitched, unspoiled, stain-free, and ready to be used. I was thinking of this process as a kind of performance, akin to that of the seamstresses who supply the material culture for the field of Living History, a cultural phenomenon as well as a popular pastime in which the “art” of war is perpetually reenacted. This form of making-as-performance in my studio was then followed by the performance of the articles in a series of staged photographs, both portraits and tabletop still lifes, in which things that perhaps we would not think of as having been made by someone are caught in the act of their making and wearing. This handle-ability, or materiality-as-process, was emphasized by the hands as they engaged the provisional immediacy of props to demonstrate acts of survival, cruelty, modesty, disguise, or fetish. I chose the title Needle Work to suggest a kind of creative process that might get under the skin: to goad and to provoke as well as to labor over lovingly, and with precision. --Allison Smith, 2009

Bio
Allison Smith (she/they) is a queer artist, time traveler, and practical animist based in Yelamu and Huichin a.k.a. the San Francisco Bay Area, on unceded Ohlone territory. Smith has presented their work at museums such as SFMOMA, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and S!GNAL Center for Contemporary Art, P.S.1/MoMA, Palais de Tokyo, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, MASS MoCA, and The Tang Museum. Smith has lectured at art schools and research universities internationally, as well as at MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Smith has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, on NPR, KQED, Art:21, PBS The Art Assignment, and in many other media and scholarly publications. Smith has received support from Public Art Fund, United States Artists, Arts Council England, FOR-SITE Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, the National Endowment for the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Notable residencies include IASPIS (Stockholm, Sweden), The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), the Museum of Modern Art Artists Experiment initiative (New York, New York), the International Studio and Curatorial Program (Brooklyn, New York), Artpace (San Antonio, Texas), and Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, California). Smith's work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Saatchi Gallery London, Linda Pace Foundation, and many other public and private collections.

The piece was recently part of the exhibition Resisting Incarceration Culture: Art as Survival at CCA. Curated by Malic Amalya, Annah Anti-Palindrome, & Michael Washington.