A few months back, I told you about Seattle-based Sharpie wizard Justine Ashbee, an emerging talent with a background in textile design whose graphic, screenprinted canvases and t-shirts I'd fallen in love with. "I spent the last three years focusing on drawings lines with marker," she says. "These drawings, as a two-dimensional medium, have a very voluminous and sensual three-dimensional quality to them—they intrinsically possess the luscious qualities of fabric and surface, the architecture of a threshold."

Which is why it came as no surprise when she told me that her new show at Oakland's Fiveten Studio will include sculptural elements—hand-woven "investigations of line and curve" composed of copper wire and filament threads, resulting in organic forms that seem to float, undulate, twist and unravel. "[Gallery co-founder] Alfonso Dominguez contacted me to express his passion for my work, and wondered if I ever made three-dimensional pieces," Ashbee explains. "This came at the same time that I was looking to revisit the sculptural weaving that I had done in the past."

"My fascination with the inner workings of the mind and body compels me toward these works," she continues. "There is something found in fiber that translates to parallel concepts of neural networks, fabric of thought and interconnectivity." The same idea also holds true for the limited-edition prints of her original drawing, "A Nameless Entity", that will be available for purchase. "When I'm drawing, I am layering, folding, expanding, compressing—and dealing with some characteristic that is dimensional. This was an exploration of a developing, a becoming... the lines reach out, not unlike synapses that reach out toward one another for contact and transmission."

Far out, man.

Fiveten Studio is located at 831 Broadway, (510) 451-9900; see and purchase Justine's work through May 1st.

- Caroline Stanley

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