Access/Excess

Io Palmer

June 21 to July 19, 2014

“By using underprivileged materials to create elaborate hand sewn constructions, this work comments on issues of high and low class societal patterns, production and consumption. Specifically, by referencing the tense and at times incongruous relationships that exist between classes, my work often takes an ironically romantic look at societal excess as seen through consumer product and environmental disasters. Drawing from a range of disparate resources, this work also focuses on how social divisions operate both in tandem and at odds with one other.

Issues of labor are an underlying and important component in my work. Appropriating tools associated with menial labor, repetitive drawing, pinning or sewing points to labor as a critical yet arbitrarily valued element within capitalist modes of production. Labor is the force that cleans up large spills to give order to the unmanageable. And labor is what drives and forms high end couture garments only accessible to very few.

Excess within society manifests in different ways and offers inspiration for creative work. Current work offers an opportunity to engage in contemporary consumer culture by researching specific grooves within society—systems of control meet unrestrained excess. Polluted waterways and beaded crystal garments find their way into and clash together in recent work. Uncontained oil spills show this excess of society and labor force (in this case the cleanup crews) work as a way to contain something that is often unmanageable. This work borrows from these moments when society shows its fullness—its unbridled opulence and its exaggerated overabundance then refashions these developments into concrete visual forms that morph between cultured sophistication, industrial work and gaudily dressed up camp.”

Io Palmer was born in Hydra—a motor-less Greek island off the coast of the Peleponesse. She grew up amongst the donkeys, the fishes, the clear blue Mediterranean sea and the jazz music her parents listened to.

Through depictions of cleaning products, labourers’ garments and various other industrial and domestic forms, Palmer explores complex issues of class, race and identity, in particular the impact of society on the individual. Trained originally as a ceramicist, she uses a variety of processes and materials including fabric, steel and sound.

Palmer has been featured in several national and international exhibitions including Working History at Reed College in Portland; Hair Follies at Concordia University in Montreal; Inside Out at the Baltimore Clayworks and a solo exhibition at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Oregon. She has participated in several residencies including the Sanskriti Foundation, New Delhi; the Santa Fe Art Institute; Art Channel in Beijing and the Ucross Foundation in Clermont, Wyoming. Io recently received an Idaho Commission on the Arts Grant (2013) and was selected to participate in the upcoming Dak’Art 2014, the 11th Biennale de l’Art African Contemporain.

She holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and an MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Io is currently an associate professor at Washington State University, Pullman, WA.