Alicia Ross is a mixed media artist from Cleveland, Ohio. She takes cross stitch and electrifies it. ” The Motherboard Series is an extension of my earlier Sampler Series. While the concepts of these two series are directly connected (the female conflict of the domestic woman vs. the woman of sexual desire), the execution has been taken one step further in scale and narrative. Once downloaded from search engine results, the image is digitally removed from its original background. The image is then put through another program that translates its pixels into cross-stitch. With jump-stitches left intact—a remnant of its mechanical fabrication—the figure appears bound by the very medium that enables her visual existence.
Using the sewing machine like a drawing instrument, I make choices of where I want the stitches to lay—often eliminating stitches from areas or only allowing the machine to stitch the outline of a specific color. Because of their size, each Motherboard takes anywhere from 1-3 months to sew. The digital aesthetic, that quite literally resembles a computer’s motherboard, juxtaposed with the hand-made associations of embroidery, speaks to the joining together of human and machine—fabricated domesticity.”
