"Craft-Centric" Review of Kern Samuel's Rough Draft @ Soft Opening

Kern Samuel, Rough Draft, 12 July–6 September, 2025

If this was a review based upon taste - the show would not score so high. But actually, its hard to fault. Soft Opening‘s curation and programming tend to be pretty exquisite, boasting a museum-level attention to detail that smaller/newer galleries itend to overlook.

No one would forget the catwalk-like structure built for Gina Fischli’s April 2024 show, Love Love Love, or the stainless steel industrial floating frames that housed Maren Karlson’s ectoplasmic graphite drawings for Staub, Storeng. At Soft Opening, it is usually a “no notes” situation, which cannot be said for everyone in the clean-goth-come-gallerist circuit.

In Rough Draft two stretches of stitched canvas hang in the centre of the gallery. Bars and Blocks (Janky Hankies) (L) and ® droops onto the floor three-quarters down, the underside of their stitched panelling clearly on display. You can examine up close Samuel’s building of patchy coloured canvas, sometimes bleached, sometimes block colour. One half of the title, “Janky Hankies” refers to the colour-coded signalling system popular in West Village gay communities of the 70s and 80s. It could mean “top” or “bottom” or - according to Bob Damron’s Address Book (1980) key sexual information:

Left Worn Brown Bandanna = Scat Top

Left Worn Mustard Bandana = Has an 8” plus

Legible at the edge of (R) and (L) is a faint imprint of the artist's foot. Is this historical, homo-social colour coding, paired with his bodily imprint, a biographical component (personal or otherwise).

(R) and (L) imitate strip quilting—a form of piecework quilting originating in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which was pioneered by a community isolated by systemic racism. In Gee’s Bend, compositions were fabricated using salvage cloth, ultimately resulting in arrangements that rejected both convention and symmetry. Rather than following pre-existing patterns, Gee’s Bend quiltmakers group their works into categories: ‘Abstraction & Improvisation’, ‘Pattern & Geometry’, ‘Housetop & Bricklayer’, ‘Lazy Gal’ and ‘Work Clothes’ - Samuel’s title “Bars and Blocks” references this arrangement.

Samuel builds on the idea of fabric as an everyday communicator of repressed codes, sexual or otherwise…fabric as an identifier, a symbol, an illicit message. Even the display of ® and (L) imitates a code of the past - each spring, the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend would “air the quilts” as a way of exhibiting an otherwise private, domestic object.

In 9 Lives a wall drawing of a nonagon is filled with nine other nonagons in various shades of green chalk. The sketchy wall drawing contributes to the relevance of the exhibition's moniker, Rough Drafts, but also mimics a talisman, beacon, or mural. Hence, I guess, the hermetic reference. The number Nine is also a magic alchemical number which, according to the press release, apparently harnesses “the ephemeral nature of site specificity to enact a tension between resolution and transition”. Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers and alchemy: that’s the esoteric art-history knowledge holy grail.

The pièce de résistance of the show was 3 Stacks. Thirty stacks of brown, well-handled A4 sheets were placed upon a custom-built timber desk, each containing a variety of diagrams, collages, marks and a biscuit in its wrapped labelled "DIA COOKIE". It resembled a children’s workspace, or Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne if he went to steiner school. The nïave, or frantic, gestures of 9 Lives are echoed in the pieces installation. As the night went on the papers found themselves increasingly scattered across the floor. Leafing through these pages felt strangely utilitarian —the opposite of the usual East End gallery space filled with unattainable concepts. Samuel’s work makes me feel like I'm lying on a quilt and catching the stitches with my hands.

3 Stacks has the feeling of rummaging loosely through papers with little purpose other than to feel them flutter.

I wish that all objects had been able to be touched, as quilts are intended. Call me craft centric.