A supplement at once inevitable and delightful weaves together found texts and images to explore the relationship between appropriation and femininity. By slicing found materials into thin strips, then recombining them in various ways, Cleave disrupts both the reading of textual sources and the pleasure that pictures of women (such as in magazine ads) are often meant to produce. No matter their origin, each material becomes obscured within the textile and helps to maintain an even tension that keeps the piece intact.

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These weavings incorporate excerpts from materials Cleave has either made or encountered over time. They include two selfies; a headshot; the face of grape company Pretty Lady; Shiseido magazine ads; and excerpts from Izumi Suzuki’s "Night Picnic," Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, Tayama Katai’s "Futon," Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Pierre Loti’s "A Ball in Edo," Miriam Silverberg’s "The Modern Girl as Militant (Movement on the Streets)," Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Cleave’s own poems.

 

They are part of a larger body of work where Cleave recontextualizes contemporary tropes of femininity against their research on the Modern Girl, an early 20th century media sensation that accused young Japanese women of emulating western fashions and ideologies.