miyoshi barosh

Miyoshi Barosh uses the vernacular traditions of craft and folk art to make her wall tapestries, paintings, and sculptural objects. The current economic crisis has added relevance to Barosh’s recent body of work centered on ideas concerned with cultural failure (the failure to make life better) and its impact on the individual. Her use of myriad materials such as fabric, Plexiglas, foam, fiberglass, paint, and found objects, as well as craft processes are a refutation of ideas of progress. Acrylic yarns and thrift-store purchased polyester knitwear are used with both comic irony and heartfelt sincerity as an Americanized arte povera. These “indigenous” fabrics and folk-craft techniques are then processed through accumulation and assemblage in opposition to male-dominated Modernism as well as a parody of aspirational consumerism.

The text and titles of many of Barosh’s pieces—Feel Better, Reflecting Our Fevered Dreams and Desires, Rescue Chair with Soft Intervention—point to a shift in responsibility to create and sustain meaningful lives from society to the individual. Cultural failure becomes internalized within the individual who turns to self-help