By Lorie Mertes, Director/Chief Curator of Moore College of Art and Design

Miami artists Frances Trombly and Leyden Rodriquez were in Philadelphia last week for the opening of Frances’ latest solo exhibition at Moore College of Art & Design. More than 350 people came out to support Moore’s new show, despite the latest snow storm. Blurring the boundaries between applied versus fine arts, the exhibition includes a mix of recent and early examples of the artist’s recreations of mundane objects using handmade textile or fiber techniques traditionally associated with women’s work or craft.

The exhibition—presented in the context of one of the country’s earliest art and design schools—serves as a conceptual bridge between past, present and future, referring to Moore’s founding as a college of art and design for women and the school’s early focus on textile design, as well as the eroding boundaries between artistic disciplines in twenty-first century arts education. They also have resonance with the history of Philadelphia itself with its numerous mills and textile manufacturers during its heyday as the “workshop of the world” in the late 1800s.

On view just down the road from Marcel Duchamp’s infamous Fountain of 1917 in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, they take on added relevance, recalling Duchamp’s gesture of elevating the value of an everyday object – but in reverse. Stretched, unprimed canvases awaiting the artist’s brush, a mop propped against the wall, a drop cloth splattered with paint, a flattened cardboard box – are all so unassuming they are frequently dismissed by viewers who presume that what they are seeing in the gallery is nothing…just an installation in-progress, a space in transition. Given Trombly’s forms are recreations of mass-produced, overlooked/undervalued objects, the meticulous weaving, embroidery, cross stitch, and crochet hand work that goes into each and every one of the sculptures often goes unnoticed.

Questioning where things come from, whether we actually see and look at them or wonder where they end up and how they relate to us individually, may seem like a lot to ask in a world overloaded with information and mass-produce things, but that is exactly the artist’s intent. The show at Moore is on view through March 15.

Trombly’s year-long solo exhibition Painting is also currently on view at Girl’s Club in Ft. Lauderdale through September 30, 2011.