“Star Trek Quilts”

WildCard

4209 Butler Street

(412) 224-2651

Jan. 15 through Feb…. “Star Trek Quilts”

WildCard

4209 Butler Street

(412) 224-2651

Jan. 15 through Feb. 24

 

A new art exhibit in Lawrenceville is boldly going where no quilt has gone before.

There’s little doubt that the original Star Trek series had a vast cultural impact.From its serious social themes to its whimsical cheesiness to William Shatner’s Shakespearian delivery, the show was a marvel of everything wonderful about the 1960s.

Today, Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi staple pops up everywhere in American pop culture, including on one of the most unlikely mediums — the quilt.

Elliot McNally’s “Star Trek Quilts” exhibit at Lawrenceville’s WildCard combines the two into a cultural juxtaposition that’s just too jarring not to be good.

“They’re supposed to be tongue and cheek,” she said. “They poke good-natured fun at the handmade sets in the original show itself and also at all the things that have followed in the wake of this show that ran for no time at all.”

The exhibit consists of 16 quilts that range from two inches all the way to three feet and began while McNally was still in college at the Savannah College of Art and Design majoring in fiber arts.

“I was in a quilting class, and I made the ‘Transporter Room One’ for a project,” McNally said.

Coupled with a visual culture class McNally took at the same time that included a discussion about the symbolism of the original Star Trek, her vision was born.

“It was a funny medium playing on everything that was already out there,” she says. “I had never seen a Star Trek quilt before,” McNally said.

With that in mind, she set out to create a variety of quilts using methods and materials both native and foreign to quilt making.

“I was really interested in using different pieces of fabric and I tried not to use anything new, so I enjoyed the struggle of trying to make different fabrics work.”

Appliqued cloth, iron-on sheets and hand embroidery all helped her to create her unique vision of the original “Star Trek” series while still keeping the humor of these images intact.

This idea, however, didn’t just come out of thin air, even in that visual culture class.

It was sparked by a serendipitous discovery at a Goodwill store, reigniting a passion brewing since childhood. A tape containing an early ’90s “Star Trek” rerun marathon (complete with vintage commercials) reintroduced the sci-fi series to the artist who had previously stayed up late to watch the spinoff, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when she was younger.

With “Star Trek” once again prominent in the media eye, McNally credits its success to “wonderful characters and the relation to the times,” citing the show’s propensity for dealing with serious issues — such as the civil rights movement — through fiction.

Though the original series is long gone, there’s still time to catch the spirit of the original with “Star Trek Quilts” in Lawrenceville through Feb. 24.