Linnéa Sjöberg

A fury of hands and feet encircle a loom’s spinning wheel, harnessed in motion yet quickening out of control. Blurs of bright clashes: mechanism and the softness of sinews amid marbled weaves of pinks, purples, static white. Upward through the ceiling, an exhibition of new woven works by Swedish artist Linnéa Sjöberg, is a reclamation of self, and a tangled pursuit to disambiguate body from labor, body from object.

Once a vessel for performative research—career woman, viking weaver, tattoo artist—Sjöberg mercilessly took on new identities, while also deconstructing personal archive and the detritus of memory. A stark departure from these dueling practices, suspended works squarely disembody persona and confront identity from within.

Flanking the dismembering scene of loom and limb, a camouflaged figure—patterned reminder of the slippage between body and backdrop—reaches over to steady or stop the spinning wheel. And while this jumpsuit exists as the thin veil between figure and object, the garment emerges from the tight woven surface, body intact.

Other assemblages in heavy woven threads, VHS tape, garments and tufts of fur orient the body from an extension of the loom to extension of bondage play. The mechanism of labor breaks apart and is replaced by the mechanism of desire. Bodies coiled within the wheel, now in rope and plastic tape; where the mimicry of tension—a tightening of threads, body strapped in balance—place pleasure in the ambiguity between body and object.

In a slow percuating foil, sprawling texts ground the body in the visceral and the meditative. Passing spine neck throat head upwards through ceiling. From this centering of self, Sjöberg emerges fully figured. An applique of her wardrobe pops out of the sheen of video tape and springing flowers: a crackling of pattern, streaks of bleach, a skirt strung of handbound chainmail brought into a belt that reads: PANIK.

There is new coherency in the gesture and garment, implicative, frenzied but free. Stomping joyously out of the frame in a return to spirit, Sjöberg finds ease in the anatomy of the present.