Just how is a superhero created? Stitch by painstaking stitch, apparently. As Mark Newport’s bright-colored, woolly, hand-knit costumes lie deflated on the gallery walls, we find ourselves contemplating the intricate labors of self-invention and the potentially dubious outcomes of success. These soft, disarmingly sophisticated works remind us that the creation of persona — that quantity so integral to one’s artistic career — can ultimately lead to a kind of hollowness in the artist and work itself.
On a more basic level, Newport is addressing traditional Romantic concerns about the relationship between the creation of art and the loss of identity. These thick, flattened costumes can be seen as grotesque answers to Yeats’ famous question, “How can you tell the dancer from the dance?” Also, the Blakean, superhuman powers of the Romantic artist are downplayed in favor of the more mundane reality of material fabrication.
Not that there was anything mundane about these costumes. My father, a self-made man himself and one of the West Coast’s most celebrated knitters, was amazed at Newport’s skill with a pair of needles. “The intarsia work, the fashioning — its incredible.” he said.
