Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Discipline and Display, Amelia Cross’s first solo exhibition in the United States and with the gallery. Cross’s body of work pushes the boundaries between reality and illusion in a cerebral play on identity and its quiet markers.
Cross came to painting through her training in tailoring and has seamlessly fused the two disciplines within her artistic practice. Working with traditional artist’s linen, she cuts, sews, and stretches her canvases by hand, in a process that borrows as much from tailoring as from fine art. The resulting works occupy a liminal space between painting and object, a territory the artist has named “sewn paintings.”
The works in Discipline and Display draw on extensive archival research into uniforms: school dress codes, workplace attire, and the garments that institutions use to identify and regulate their wearers. Visits to the V&A and the Goldsmith’s Textile Collection informed compositions that move between historical and contemporary dress and trace the continuity of clothing as a means of control. The exhibition is equally interested in the small deviances (the loosened tie, the lopsided stocking) through which wearers imagine themselves to be defying authority. These minor rebellions, Cross suggests, are perhaps obedience to a subtler set of rules. In each work, the figure is entirely absent. Yet a person is always unmistakably present, evoked through the residues of wear, the bleeding of a pocketed pen, or the labeled text inside of a collar.
Throughout the exhibition, the artist plays with the longstanding art historical tradition of trompe l’oeil, an artistic technique of illusion that renders a two-dimensional object or scene three-dimensional. In effect, Cross’s painted buttons appear sewn, shadows appear behind painted pockets, and the boundary between what is fabricated and what is depicted collapses. In addition to the level of sartorial control paid to the work’s intricately painted and sewn forms, Cross’s palette is deliberately restrained. Her subdued coloration allows the textured ground to carry the compositions, while small details of color lend an air of individuality to the dressed canvases.
In The Compromise (2026), a monumental pocket hangs besides a smaller one. The two-work composition reads as a commentary on the art world: the larger pocket belonging to the moneyed art-world executive; the smaller, in both physical and metaphorical terms, to the artist. This work is also distinct due to its conceptual underpinnings. Painted into the interior of the larger pocket lies a secret message written by the artist, a replica of which will be transmitted to the work’s acquirer: “a note passed,” as Cross puts it, “under the watch of the gallery.” It is, she notes, the only rule she ever broke in school. The tongue-in-cheek gesture draws on Michel Foucault’s writings on power and surveillance, as well as the conceptual strategies of Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono, and Marcel Duchamp, all artists who found ways to encode rules or instructions within their own works of art.
Discipline and Display is, in this sense, a quiet act of identity making and marking. The artist’s hand is put on display in the very act of constructing identity: a demonstration of discipline and a portrait of its cost, whose message is still waiting to be received.
Amelia Cross (b. 1995; lives and works in London) studied at the London College of Fashion and University of the Arts London, before receiving an MA in Painting from Royal College of Art, where she was awarded the RCA President and Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship. She is also a recipient of the Hesketh Hubbard Bursary and participated in the Lee Alexander McQueen Sarabande Foundation Residency in London. Cross has exhibited in group exhibitions in London, including at the Mall Galleries.