Kate Westerholt

witty, subversive, regressive, funny. This work makes me giggle a little. Not overly original, i feel like i've seen a lot of this type of work, essentially text work. Yes, it's been recontextualized, but i feel pretty much any text that's presented outside it's original forms has been recontextualized. If she had just written the text, black typed ink on white paper, i feel it would have nearly the same effect. she's product-ized it beyond that though, and i think that's her greatest strength. Seems to fit in with what John Simon Jr. has been telling us. Make work that can be a sell-able unit.

Artist Biography
"Kate Westerholt is a cross stitch sampler designer with a difference. She takes 18th century colonial motifs and combines them with modern film quotes and song lyrics in an attempt to question what our modern day culture will actually mean in hundreds of years' time. Her work has become extremely popular, getting interest from Vogue, Topshop and the V&A museum in London."
Cross Stitch

"irony asks nothing of us. in letting itself off the hook, it lets us off the hook. we don’t just laugh at the cruel and the bizarre – which might leave us feeling some culpability even as we laugh – we laugh at ourselves laughing. we do not merely distance ourselves from our terrors for reasons of psychic survival, we congratulate ourselves on our distancing."

"irony is the postmodern form of conspicuous self-consciousness and suits our era’s puerility – its fey aestheticism and political cynicism — to a tee. it is complacency’s rationalization, disengagement’s excuse, the alienated spectator’s self-justification. the ironic bystander (the phrase is redundant) is the citizen’s jeering nemesis and the poet’s wily shadow trying to make sure that truth and beauty and goodness, those stalwarts of the world before it was disenchanted, do not re-infect the post-modern’s cool voice with hot earnestness. or make us think too hard or feel too keenly."
benjamin barber, " the price of irony", salmagundi

the reason that art in the postmodern, existential world has reached something of a cul-de-sac is not that art itself is exhausted, but that the existential worldview is. just as rational modernity previously exhausted its forms and gave way to a-perspectival postmodernity, so now the postmodern itself is on a morbid deathwatch, with nothing but infinitely mirrored irony to hold its hand, casting flowers where they will not be missed. the skull of postmodernity grins on the near horizon, and in the meantime, we are between two worldviews, one slowly dying, one not yet born.
-ken wilber, from the irony and the ecstasy

Link to an interview with the artist - Cross Stitcher Magazine

Link to gallery representing artist - Sesame Gallery

Link to artist website - www.katewesterholt.com - seems to have fallen out of domain registration. get it now so you can sell it to her later.