Apprentice is the sum of both knowing and doing, of practice and theory. It is tested and proved in Abbey Muza's woven and drafted overtures to the machines that once were the raison d'être for an entire model of education and community building. Soft, subtractive, graphite drawings, each approximating their namesake component—Sinkers, Catchbar Linkage, and the almost too good to be true Eccentric Stud Segment, to name a few—are suspended on a paper-white ground. Strips of metal seem to curl languidly as if they were ribbons of rayon fresh off the line. Recalling the oblique draft work of Francis Picabia, there is a clear disposition towards function, but they are estranged from the possibility by virtue of an erudite whimsy inflected by the artist's hand and our own alienation from even the vestiges of productive processes. 

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Likewise, Muza's textiles operate within a similar register, but on the opposite end of the productive spectrum. Whereas drafting the components of the machinery employed in the ​manufacture of textiles is a prelude to the endeavor of production, Muza's textile works are arbiters both of the hand and tool. The warp and weft blur the images they are tasked with distributing in much the same way as the final product mystifies the devices that made it. Footer, Legger, a depiction of the hosiery that sustained so many educations and families, pushes towards a spectral kind of abstraction, where the image, just barely there, shimmers between threads of silk and cotton. Like each of its cohort, Muza endows this object with the same tentative fragility of an image on the brink of erasure. Images like the eponymous bit in Pivoting Tension, Coiler, seem to hover as if they were holograms over their delicate and breezy support. 

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Muza's process is one of patient study and intuitive relations to their chosen materials. In the run-up for this exhibition, they found themselves immersed in the remaining archives of the Wyomissing Polytechnic Institute, combing through drawers of anonymized parts and manuals. Muza's careful attention to craft does not subject itself to the Cartesian polarity of mind and body, which can be just as easily interpellated as the divide between manual and cognitive labor. Instead, each well-planned maneuver, at the drafting table, on the loom, or in the archive, sees the artist as an apprentice, as a grasper, as a learner, as an indelibly chimeric figure elegantly poised between the two. 

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I write this after youtubing “How to Sew a Button on Male Dress Pants : Buttons & Sewing Tips,” for a brief moment, I myself was an apprentice. 

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Excerpt from exhibition text by Gareth Kaye

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