THE STRETCH
SAM DIENST
9/19/25-10/18/25
Above: Sam Dienst - The Stretch, hand-woven tapestry, 2025.
The Weather Station is pleased to present The Stretch, an exhibition of new work in fiber by Sam Dienst, opening September 19th and on view through October 18th. The Stretch brings together soft sculptures and stitched drawings from this Detroit-based artist, as well as a large-scale tapestry woven in the artist's signature style. In addition to the works created in her studio, the artist collaborated with The Weather Station for this installation on a series of large wall drawings, each placing the artist's work within the space.
The exhibition's title The Stretch refers to that moment in a working artist's process when for whatever reason - be it curiosity, ambition, boredom, or some combination of all of these - she moves outside her familiar territory. Over the years of her practice, Detroit-based artist Sam Dienst has clocked countless hours to develop a distinct and subjective language of tapestry weaving - a complex medium that demands much from its practitioners. With The Stretch, Dienst includes one of these distinctive weavings on the rear wall of the gallery, but accompanies this piece with forays into several new forms: less familiar, but no less assured.
Above L to R: Stretch Sculpture 01 and Stretch Sculpture 04 - two new works by Sam Dienst installed in the gallery.
“All of these works reference machines," says the artist about this new body of soft sculptures, “they look like they could do something, or plug into the wall... but they are misfits of some sort. I think of them as misfit machines." The soft sculptures on view in The Stretch each make use of old textiles from the artist's personal collection in her studio, as well as thrifted materials and accrued leftovers from the college where she works as a weaving teacher. Repurposed clothing, thrifted prints, all of which have been stitched, folded, stuffed, and assembled to make small, plush sculptures referencing… A sink? A plane? A missile with an intestine?
"They are all based on something observed, but at the same time, they aren't anything specific," Dienst says. "Lately, I'm having a lot of fun giving people less answers." The ambiguities hovering around the Dienst's misfit machines are distinct part of their charm, as well as the unexpected materials that they incorporate, and the ingenuity of their assembly. In Stretch Sculpture 1, a braided rope pours from an inverted funnel onto itself, referencing water, or a kitchen sink. Upon closer inspection, this "rope" is revealed to be plastic shopping bags. Stretch Sculpture 02, a winged and striped figure hanging from the ceiling is somehow equal parts fighter pilot and sandworm. And positioned the gallery's front-facing window, Stretch Sculpture 04 reveals a switch-like form on its backside, with a spout is propped up on its front.
Above L to R: Stretch Stitched Drawing 02 and Stretch Stitched Drawing 04
Elsewhere in The Stretch, Dienst has created a series of illustrations of her sculptures, flattening their three-dimensional forms in order to render them graphically, in a bold palette that relates the two bodies of work. Rather than working on paper, Dienst's Stretch Stitched Drawings are formed on square panels on which the artist has embroidered and beaded “portraits" of her machines, using stretched and striped fabric as a ground. Although the artist has previously used her own work as source material for her weavings, these intimate portraits represent another "stretch" for the artist, who debuts this new form for The Weather Station. In these works, a viewer is drawn in more closely by the delicacy and finesse of the artist's hand, and the transformations of the machines into material shapes.
Above: Sam Dienst - The Stretch (detail), hand-woven tapestry, 2025.
At the rear of the gallery is the largest piece in exhibition, Dienst's tapestry which is also titled The Stretch. In this piece measuring roughly five feet square, the artist literally weaves it all together, incorporating multiple views of her misfit machines alongside the surface embellishments she also employs in her drawings. A longtime weaver, Dienst's tapestries are the form for which she has become primarily known, and in viewing The Stretch, once can immediately understand why. The artist skillfully works against the inherent grid structure of the loom, manipulating the puffy acrylic yarns she uses to create and suggest volumes and organic movement. By working with an EPI (ends per inch) of 6 - traditionally considered to be on low end - the edges and curves of the artist's shapes begin to feel almost pixelated. In this sense, Dienst's weavings evoke a nostalgia for lo-res graphics, 8-bit arcade games, or the kitsch pattern designs one might find on skating rink carpets. Once again, the artist uses her soft sculptures as source material, but this time for an abstract woven composition in which positive and negative shape are equally chromatically charged. When speaking about color, the artist adds that "the goal is randomness....I can't quite put my finger on why I'm drawn to certain shades or colors, but it's served me well, so I don't question it."
Above: Installation view of Stretch Stitched Drawing 01 with wall drawing
For her installation at The Weather Station, Dienst collaborated with resident artists to create a series of site-specific drawings, executed directly onto the gallery walls in undulating, cobalt blue organic lines. Made through a process of tracing the projected shadows of her soft sculptures, these abstracted silhouettes act another layer of "stretching" the artist's forms, providing an additional interpretation of their imagery and scaling up to the space of the gallery itself.
Sam Dienst is a tapestry weaver and sculptor currently living and working in Detroit. She has shown her work in exhibitions at the Louis Buhl Gallery, Detroit, MI; the Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; the Museum of Museums, Seattle, WA; Martha’s Gallery, Austin, TX; and the Metropolitan Museum of Design, Detroit, MI. Her solo exhibition Cartoon Logic debuted at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York City earlier this year. She graduated in 2016 with a BFA in Fibers from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA in Fibers at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2021. She currently teaches courses in the Fiber Departments at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI.