Social media reactions are fleeting. This artist wants to provide lasting commentary.
By Abby Zeugner
Boone artist Jeana Eve Klein has created a series of tapestries that are a reaction to social media based on her observations and personal experiences.
Mike Williams
Raleigh
Jeana Eve Klein has spent hundreds of hours this summer bent over her sewing machine, surrounded by mounds of scrap fabric and cut-out letters.
For the past month, she has been working on an installation called “#unfriendmeifyoustillsupporthim,” which she calls her most “personal and vulnerable work.” It’s made up of soft sculptures and a series of tapestries, both providing commentary on two social movements.
Klein, a working artist and associate professor of fibers at Appalachian State in Boone, is in Raleigh this summer as the PNC Pop In Artist in Residence at Artspace in downtown.
As she has been constructing her piece, her workspace has faced the apartment where she lived in the ‘90s while studying design at N.C. State, when her hope of becoming a professional artist was just beginning to blossom.
“Full circle,” said Klein, now 43.
The work will be on display in Artspace’s Upfront Gallery & Lobby beginning Aug. 3 for the First Friday Art Walk and throughout the entire month.
One section of soft sculptures is made up of several shapes of the symbol and letters of “#MeToo.” She says she is responding to what she perceives as societal acceptance that the #MeToo movement is an inevitability.
The tapestries, which Klein calls “Recent Activity,” consist of massive spreads of fabric that includes social media reactions. They all say something different but follow the same format of simple text: “I didn’t (do this thing), but I reacted to it on social media.”
“I was thinking about the concept of just ‘liking’ things on Facebook, and about how it’s this action, but it’s not really a real action,” Klein said. “There’s this, like, defining oneself online through the responses to other people’s stuff, rather than through one’s own ideas.”
Both parts of the installation have roots in her personal experiences.
Klein created several #MeToo soft sculptures that are lying on the floor in a pile. During First Friday, visitors can help stuff the pieces with recycled fabric. At the end of the exhibition, Klein will give the sculptures away. Mike Williams
#MeToo
The #MeToo piece consists of dozens of soft sculptures in a pile on the floor and is filled with symbolism.
“I feel like if I hung them all up on the wall it would just look too formal and organized,” Klein said. “And I don’t think that this idea is.”
The piece has a lengthy but personal title: “I Feel So Lucky (that my most egregious experience was that time at Lutheran Confirmation camp when I was 12 and the counselor slid his hand up my leg. It was basically all skin that was exposed anyway, so does that even count?).”
Klein said the idea for the work started as a concept when the #MeToo movement started gaining traction on social media. She said she didn’t immediately post #MeToo on her own social media to signal she had a similar experience of harassment or assault.
She said she felt her experiences — the counselor at church camp, being casually groped at a flea market, a man exposing himself on the subway — were minor in comparison to what many women have experienced.
“To me that is how we are societally,” she said. “We just kind of expect and accept that all women will lose bodily autonomy at some point.”
She was referring to everything from school dress codes, which she said teaches young girls that their clothing choices make them responsible for their other’s actions, to the video of President Donald Trump on “Access Hollywood” making lewd comments about women.
Klein said she felt “a little bit weird” drawing upon what she perceives as minor experiences to make art about the #MeToo movement. But she reconciled that feeling by deciding she will give away the #MeToo sculptures at the end of the exhibition. In that way, the words may connect better with someone else.
“I don’t get ownership of this idea, at all,” she said. “They will just be given away to any self-identified woman that it resonates with.”
During the exhibition, there will be a wall available for guests to share their feelings about the art, or their experiences if they so desire.
The colors used to make the pillows are in flesh tones, ranging from deep browns to pale pinks, and in what Klein calls “stereotypically feminine” colors — pink, purple and red. They lie on the ground in a pile, resembling an intestinal mess, and the words are not easily distinguishable from afar. It’s necessary to get close, investigate and participate.
The sculptures are three-dimensional, Klein said, because she felt they needed to be touched and held.
The fabric used to make and stuff them is donated fabric from Klein’s late grandmother’s church quilting club. The fabric “all has its own history,” Klein said.
“It has all passed through other ladies’ hands,” she said.
Boone artist Jeana Eve Klein works on her latest installation at Artspace in downtown Raleigh. She’s spent the last month as the PNC Pop In Artist in Residence working on tapestries and soft sculptures. Abby Zeugner
Social media tapestries
The idea for the tapestries came to her in late January 2017, when Trump signed the travel ban for several predominantly Muslim countries.
Protests popped up in airports all over the country, but Klein, who was living in Boone with her two young children at the time, could not drive two hours to the nearest airport to take part. She followed the protests on Facebook, liked friends’ posts, and commented with phrases like “I’m there in spirit!”
But Klein felt this style of participation was inadequate and seemed to reflect how people incorporate social media in their lives.
Klein said Facebook, and social media in general, tend to have a “flattening” effect on everything.
“We have the same menu of responses, no matter the weight in gravity of the situation, in the way we react to it,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry that your grandma is dying.’ ‘Oh, I like your taco dinner.’”
Thus the first tapestry of “Recent Activity” was born: “I didn’t protest at JFK airport, but I liked it.”
Klein went on to document her responses to other Facebook posts.
“Not just in the world of political activity, but also professional and personal wishes, and dreams and guilt and all of that,” she said.
Some of them included:
“I didn’t teach my kid how to swim in five days, but I liked it.”
“I didn’t help pull down a Confederate statue, but I loved it.”
That phrase ended up on a T-shirt.
“I did go through all these iterations of, does it make more sense to paint this? To screen print it?” she said of her choice to use fabric as the project’s main medium. “When it came down to it, there was something about the tangibility of fabric in contrast to the intangibility of all things digital that made sense.”
Klein is expanding upon pieces she’s already made, spending more time on them, making them intentionally ugly, gaudy and difficult to miss. One hanging at Artspace now is made of neon yellow lace and plaid, with sequins outlining every letter that spells an anti-Trump sentiment.
She said it’s now a commentary on the sort of celebratory aspect of reacting to something on Facebook.
“‘Look at me, I angry-faced something!’ But it’s not really doing anything,” she said.
Cards filled out by Artspace visitors are part of Jeana Eve Klein’s “Recent Activity.” Abby Zeugner
In the Artspace lobby, visitors can fill out card, prompted with “I didn’t (fill in the blank), but I (reacted to) it.”
Klein sees this as a way to get a snapshot of Raleigh at this moment in time — what people are concerned about, and how they’re reacting to the things going on in the world right now.
Klein said the two parts of the installation work together to combat the fleetingness of social media.
“With the speed of all the news cycle, our tendency is to let things slip away really quickly,” she said. “Like oh now I’m really angry about this, now I’m super angry about this, now I’m angry about this…
“This makes it not disappear. You can’t not see this. You can’t just scroll down and they’re gone.”
Details
What: Opening reception for “#unfriendmeifyoustillsupporthim” by Jeana Eve Klein
When: Aug. 3, 6 to 10 p.m.; on view through Aug. 25
