AUNTWAVE: a funky, love-filled trend for crazy-making times
AUNTWAVE: a funky, love-filled trend for crazy-making times
Blessed Trend Alert
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For decades, my aunt Ellen has painted beautiful abstracted landscapes onto and into colored-glass panes. Back in the ‘60s, she worked on canvas, but eventually gravitated toward her own version of stained glass, “painting with light” and exhibiting work over the years in vibey places like college libraries and church gallery shows, while taking on architectural commissions …
Ellen has skills & vision, and her name rightfully RINGS OUT in the tight-knit glass-art community — but anyone in that community would probably tell you that glass art does not get the widespread critical consideration its practitioners and devotees believe it’s due !!
Erin and I have thought a lot about Ellen’s work, in no small part because she’s kindly blessed Spyplane HQ with a few pieces. But RECENTLY we’ve been thinking about her in the context of an ongoing, highly popping trend…
We’re officially articulating this trend today for the first time, but it’s been a bubbling leitmotif in this newsletter more or less since day one:
AUNTWAVE.
“Blackbird Spyplane,” we hear you saying, “holy s**t, you’ve done it again profoundly — but, real quick, what’s Auntwave ??”
The boundaries are porous. Erin is a proud, actual aunt who likes to craft colorful funky s**t in her spare time, which helped this idea germinate, but an Auntwave jawn-maker doesn’t need to be a literal aunt — their work will, however, contain such stereotypically aunt-like characteristics as “ZANY FLAIR” and “KOOKY SWAG” … It will strike a compromise between domestic utility and pure, whim-chasing decorativeness, but tilted definitively toward the latter … It may reflect tender, nurturing qualities of the sort we broadly associate with motherhood, but its maker is concerned first & foremost with exploring and expressing their own personality and view of the world … It is palpably the product of love, but also the product of a sly and slightly strange wit … It tends toward a colorful and elaborately patterned aesthetic, and / or unlikely mediums (like glass art) and even at its most virtuosic there’s something about it that feels homemade, unselfconscious and like the result of a series of idiosyncratic and maybe even defiantly “wrong” decisions…
We R talking about the kind of crafting-adjacent “on its own trip” vibe that you might encounter in its rawest form in a crunchy town like Sedona, AZ, or Gualala, CA, popping into a surprisingly good roadside gallery, community arts center, U.G.H.Z-style coffee house, or (shout out to Ellen) community church and seeing what’s up with the local visionaries…
“No doubt, no doubt, wow, you are great at writing newsletters,” you’re saying. “What are some examples of Auntwave?”
We’ve covered many makers who fall under the AUNTWAVE UMBRELLA, even if we didn’t realize at the time that we were hashing out a preliminary SPYPLANE AUNTWAVE CANON… Drawn roughly, that canon might include:
Laurel Burch, whose enamel pins and garments (some are above) we wrote about here … and Santa Fe-based Nio Tavlos, whose coyote pins and “Beastie Love” tees and sweatshirts float around at resellers pretty readily...
Karen Tiede, whose wild knit rugs we wrote about here and shouted out again just the other day …
Carol Grigg, who put ill watercolor southwestern scenes on tees & sweatshirts.
Caroline Kunka, a Philadelphia artist who did the cover for Tierra Whack’s concept-rap masterpiece Whack World and makes very sick airbrushed tees heavy on cartoonish animal motifs — she represents a vibrant young PUNK-AUNTWAVE wing.
Collina Strada — the creation of Hillary Taymour, a young RUNWAY PUNK-AUNTWAVE jawnsmith whose s**t Erin has loved for a minute (and which we discussed with Hayley Williams when we interviewed her here.)
Small Talk Studio, a SpyFriend and one of the true GOATS of the current hand-drawn-jawn scene, who uses fabric markers & embroidery to FREAK jackets, pants & tees… this is auntwave at a relatively more dude-ish end of the spectrum, but for our money it’s got some nice auntcore energies all the same!
SpyFriend Ella Emhoff, who makes intriguingly off-kilter, brightly colored knits, and Elspeth Vance, whose overshot-weave-inspired knits & pillows have a faint yet undeniable auntwaveness to them…
Tauba Auerbach, whose artistic practice is too manifold to be reduced to a single strain, but ONE of its strains is what you might call “UNISEX MATH-AUNT JEWELRY.”
Elmer Gomer, a line created by a gifted and inventive dude down in Austin whose beautiful embroidered patches and visibly mended jawns flow out of hippie / Deadhead culture but have some pleasingly batty Auntwave energy to them, too.
And Kiki Suarez, who did the art for weird ‘80s t-shirts we’ve covered, like “Computer Woman” and “Book Woman” below:
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“That all makes sense, Blackbird Spyplane,” we hear U saying, “but why is Auntwave popping NOW, at this precise historical juncture?”
In a fresh break from the soulless D.T.C. timeline-brand minimalism and corporatized soy banter clogging our IG feeds and filling ads (a cursed aesthetic we discussed in our Un-Grammable Hang Zone Manifesto), Auntwave’s appeal is that it reflects the singular, anomalous P.O.V.s of actual people — largely but, again, not necessarily women — whose primary motivation is not accommodating (and pandering to) someone else’s sense of comfort, but chasing their own unruly visions, on their own time; playing “by their own rules”; and crafting pieces that demand to be met partway by the ppl who encounter them…
In that sense, Auntwave is an un-twee, un-indealized relative of “cottagecore.” It derives from the same wellspring of traditionally domestic/decorative arts (baking, knitting, gardening, crafting) that so many of us got in touch with over the past ~2 years that it became a Covid cliché: The kinds of slow-moving, cribbo-based hobbies and pursuits that lockdown helped many of us (re)appreciate.
BUT, crucially, the energy of an Auntwave jawn is weirder (bordering on grotesque) than a picturesque loaf of Instagram bread, or a cozy oatmeal-colored hand-knit pullover… There’s something that feels more unique, and uniquely daring, about an Auntwave jawn — it’s a little noisier, a little riskier, a little loopier, possibly a little unhinged, and at odds with the soft textures and quiet lines of the nesting-magazine “hygge” fetish…
All of which confers upon AUNTWAVE an optimistic-but-unkempt aspect that feels well-suited to these manic, loopy, crazy-making times — when, as much as we wish we were enjoying the simple lives in the simple domestic paradises that the cottagecore fantasy invokes, we’re actually going a little nutty & climbing the walls against a backdrop of global insanity, fear, anger, and hope…
When I was talking to Aaron from Porches for the sletter a few months back, he put me on to the highly auntwave-ish work of Joyce Francis, an NYC artist who carves hyper-intricate pictures into blocks of acrylic using dentist’s drills. We noted the long history of quote-unquote “women’s arts” that have been ignored or dismissed outright as “merely” decorative / domestic, rather than serious creations worthy of consideration & respect…
Lately, though, the RESPECT has been rising. Maybe the most prominent example is Gee’s Bend quilts and those of artists like Faith Ringgold and Rosie Lee Tompkins: idiosyncratic “outsider” masterpieces produced by black women light-years away from anything resembling “the academy,” but which have increasingly come up for institutional reappraisal, with book-length salutes & major museum surveys like the fantastic 2020 Los Angeles MOCA “With Pleasure: Pattern & Decoration” show…
You can draw a direct line from the “rediscovery” of those quilts to the stunning jawnz Spyfriend Emily Bode whips up — wildly influential (and widely imitated), Bode is a key figure connecting the world of Mach 3+ jawns enthusiasm and the world of Auntwave, encouraging inhabitants of the former to seek out & appreciate the FUNKY, DECORATIVE, LOVE-SUFFUSED, SUI GENERIS, HAND-FORMED BEAUTY on display in the latter, one overshot-weave blanket coat and lacy-tablecloth bowling shirt at a time…
You can follow the Auntwave thread in several different directions — from the colorful hand-knit balaclavas Greater Goods sells out instantly every time they drop them (RARE ARTISAN AUNTWAVE-GORP!), to the similarly crunchy balaclavas Valencia Chanelle makes, to the beautifully blotchy & misshapen Staffordshire-pottery-tweaking mugs and teacups that Ginny Sims sells out on the reg, to SF-based textile artist Llane Alexis, to brilliant video artists like Spyplane favorite Shana Moulton, or back in time to Ken Price’s, Robert Arneson’s and Elizabeth Murray’s canonized fine-art pieces:
Ceramics is, unsurprisingly, an AUNTWAVE GOLDMINE — in addition to Ginny Sims’ stuff, we r feeling Katie Kimmel’s delightful dog-themed vessels, which she makes solo and in collaboration with Laura Chautin …
… and Victoria Savka’s candlesticks, combs, and mugs (a few of which are below)…
… and these $65 “face mugs” that eagle-eyed jawnspotting SpyFriend Emily Keegin tipped us off to, made by an Etsy seller named OMGdeliciousLOL (two of which are below, under the Savka joints):
Again, are all the above people literally aunts? We don’t know, and ultimately it doesn’t matter because even though Auntwave possesses at its core some irreducibly “feminine” energy, we here at Blackbird Spyplane are in no way gender essentialists, so we know that ANY jawnscrafter can theoretically channel Auntwave vibes.
Salute!!
⛽️ This Thursday we’ve got a RARE early-access presale with our friends at Graziano & Gutiérrez, as they drop their spring collection, full of natural-dye jawns and other beautiful slappers, grown, dyed & woven in Oaxaca and cut in Portland. ONLY our Cla$$ified SpyFriends will be granted access, so if you lack that level of $ecurity clearance, smash the upgrade, support BBSP, enjoy life, and don’t miss out partner !!
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"as much as we wish we were enjoying the simple lives in the simple domestic paradises that the cottagecore fantasy invokes, we’re actually going a little nutty & climbing the walls against a backdrop of global insanity, fear, anger, and hope…"
alongside the conceptualisation and recognition of AUNTWAVE slappers, this quote resonates so heavy. sletter gold everytime.
As always, I truly enjoyed "immediate mood- and life-improvement" when reading this. Shout out to "crunchy town... Gualala, CA" which I feel like I know after reading 'already dead' which was itself a Spyplane recommendation