ABOUT
The Stain Lab is a textile centered intergenerational co-lab between emerging artist Nick D’Alessandro and established artist Christine Tarkowski. Both artist work in sprawling modes of textiles, sculpture and design. The Stain Lab’s process of affecting textiles is one that starts with a raw cloth’s qualities and provenance, and the seasonal availability plants in proximity to their Chicago workshop. Fresh and dried plants are gathered from their neighborhood community garden and local urban markets, and through a brewing process creating naturally dyed atmospheric grounds. They use fugitive material to imprint earthy and chemical meaning, deriving from familiar yet ineffable base relationships. Fiber-reactive dye then colors the textiles in layers, creating deep space through immersion dying, or chromatic landscapes via printmaking and painting processes. Each textile is treated as a unique painting or mono-print, labored over in time, with form, color and temperament emerging through creative process.
Every wearable is patterned, cut, and constructed by hand in their Little Village studio by either Christine or Nick. Each cloth’s eccentricities prompting a final form. They collaboratively architect each wearable’s individual aesthetic character, by curating singularly created textiles specially sourced to design and build a sole charismatic garment. Each garment is the only of its kind. And each wearable a living object, with imprints of time past, and an anticipation of adapting to the future. Within a single garment or ensemble, a compositional aggregate of material and matter collide to create a temporal object that resists inertia.
CO/FOUNDERS’ BIOS
Nick D’Alessandro is an artist who focuses on the industry waste stream. His work draws from the events of planned obsolescence, collecting the objects of its disregard. The materiality of the objects studied becomes centered and honored for their exhausted utility. D’Alessandro’s work investigates extraction systems as a catalyst for land destruction, digital colonialism, and material reuse within the textile industries. He asks what the aesthetics of these essential materials offer a throwaway society, and looks for the point at which an object becomes waste.
D'Alessandro received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus on Sculpture, Fiber and Material Studies, and Fashion. He is the director of the streetwear fashion brand WWWYRED. His work has been exhibited in Chicago at; LVL3, Sawhorse, EXPO, and in NYC at NADA and Gern En Regalia. His work has been published in Document Journal, Graphite, and Like a Field.
Christine Tarkowski is an artist working in a variety of formats including the making of permanent public sculptures, propositional drawings, cast glass models, and textile yardage. Her current works are in pursuit of the abstract, drawing on history, craft tectonics, and archetypes. She employs methods of dimensional abstraction to evolve narrative elements that refer to dissolution of order through processes of alchemy, heat, and willful transformation.
Tarkowski received undergraduate degrees from Parsons School of Design and Fashion Institute of Design in Textiles and Glass and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she’s the Chair of Fiber and Material Studies.
She’s been commissioned to create public works by; University of Illinois Chicago, Millennium Park, City of Chicago, Socrates Sculpture Park; Manilow Sculpture Park at Governors State University. She has exhibited works at; Corning Museum of Glass, Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, Arts Club Chicago, RISD Museum, The Renaissance Society, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center. Her awards include; Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media Columbia College Chicago/3 Arts Fellow, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist Award, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, Franconia Sculpture Park Grant Jerome Foundation, and Creative Capital Foundation.
Product photos by Brody Broggs
