Amy Firestone Rosen: Dancing on the Ceiling is a site-specific installation representing a new evolution in Rosen’s practice. These works combine hand-crafting and computer design, fiber objects, and digital imagery. The exhibition demonstrates the great range of Rosen’s techniques and media and the ways in which craft intersects with technology.

These pieces began at the thrift shops where Rosen searches for vintage clothing. She is drawn to midcentury fashion for its references to a certain ideal of femininity that she is interested in unpacking. The chosen pieces become the “positives” for Rosen’s printing process. Their underlying patterns, textures, and forms emerge like x-rays inked and pressed on paper. The resulting prints often become artworks in their own right or are photographed and manipulated digitally, sometimes combined with other images and color.

The first iteration of the installation at Craft Alliance appeared at the Foundry Art Center in St. Charles. Responding to the industrial lines of the architecture and the oversize scale of the gallery, Rosen re-conceived her prints as tapestries printed at large scale on translucent fabric. The imagery became, at the same time, more imposing and more ephemeral, like memories of a time long gone.

The installation adds vibrancy and color at Craft Alliance in the Creative Commons, a gathering space dedicated to creative exchange. The tapestries hover overhead, softening the architectural edges and filtering the lights with warmth. Amy Firestone Rosen: Dancing on the Ceiling invites us to consider the many layers of the past that continue to color our present.

Amy Firestone Rosen is a native of St. Louis who returned after obtaining a BFA in Visual Communications from the University of Kansas. She worked primarily as a graphic designer for over twenty years before a growing interest in printmaking led her to further education and eventual studio practice.