Single Story | Ingrid Restemayer

Single Story takes the idea of the house as a situation of place and circumstance. Each piece is the house overlayed with a stitched or collaged element. Simple elements - stitches, the image of a chicken - can change the implied situation. The combination tells a single story.

Ingrid Restemayer returns to the Susan Hensel Gallery with her latest series Single Story — a characteristically serene yet piercing look at human life. With this collection, her fiber art moves into the domain of architecture. These are pieces that trace the outline of spaces, exploring what the shape and content of these containers mean for those of us who must make our lives in them.

Each piece builds around a unifying composition: the outline of a single story building framed in a square. This striking regularity across the pieces allows Restemayer to develop a dialogue with the viewer, continuing to ask questions and assert new viewpoints that build with a force few series are willing to commit to.

That commitment creates a powerful, cumulative effect, one that only exists because of its aesthetic restraint. In fact, some of the pieces are so minimal as to feel ascetic, an imposed lack that, through its very strictness, opens us up to new kinds of riches.

Rather than feeling scant, the works come across much more like rigorously designed studies. The elements seem to be placed with the care and hand of a surgeon or electrician — with plenty of blood and voltage on the line.