At LaiSun Keane, Michael C. Thorpe’s Quilts Challenge Convention in “Barstool Sports”

Basketball is a sport of equal and opposite forces, swift actions met by harsh and instinctive reactions. Hoops springboard in and out of place, basketballs bounce off surfaces, and team formations are constantly disrupted by the other team’s intentions. Artist Michael C. Thorpe’s new exhibition, “Barstool Sports,” running through October 27 at LaiSun Keane, is a collection of intricately sewn quilts depicting athletes caught in this precarious relationship. The technicolor quilts depict basketball players in poses otherwise conventional if not for Thorpe’s distinctive practice which employs crudely cut out swatches of colored fabric layered and sewn together with a quilting machine to create flattened cartoon-esque scenes. The edges of Thorpe’s quilts are left unfinished—batting and dangling threads are visible where there would otherwise be a tidy border. The outcomes are undeniably quilts, but quilts filtered through a style that when not abandoning tradition, distorts it.

A locus of this style is his shedding of the binaries of competition for players who seem more like partners than opponents. In Kisses + Licks All Over (2024), a pair of pink seaweed-shaped hands slither into a depiction of two athletes locked in stalemate, centering the physicality of the act in lieu of triumph or defeat. There’s a similar type of staging in No Cohesive Storyline (2024), where one athlete dunking over a woozy-yet-prominent player seems an inevitable part of the ballet the game is portrayed as throughout the exhibition. Thorpe, who played basketball at Emerson College, is both physically and emotionally familiar with the game, yet “Barstool Sports” seems less a paean to the competitive fervor of basketball, as it is to the muscle memory the sport leaves you with. Characters’ limbs often look like paper cutouts, like sinuous and amorphous appendages bound by varicolored sleeves. The musculature, or lack thereof, of these characters, exemplifies the body’s centrality in these works and Thorpe’s homage to its endurance.

Yet despite paying tribute to bodies, there’s little valorization of specific players in these works which allows us to focus on their construction rather than the nostalgia they elicit. Beloved Ritz Cracker (2024), the one piece in the exhibition that does reference specific icons—Michael Jordan and the Tasmanian Devil— does employ nostalgia, but in a holistic fashion that presents these references as a crucial part of the artist’s love for the game. The work is faintly like a palimpsest, where references often overlap and recontextualize each other resulting in a singular and wholly unique identification with the sport.  Thorpe’s expertise is abundantly clear elsewhere, in works like Guitar the Basketball Player (2024), where he manages to convey a large sense of momentum through simple elements such as a chain swinging around a neck and the blue-green striations which backdrop the subject. Completely Unimagined (2024) also draws from a diverse armory of technique with the comic book-esque zigzag pattern signifying motion. Thorpe’s skill is thoroughly on display here, though not without a bit of noise in the background. As can be inferred from the exhibition title, “Barstool Sports” takes its name from the frequently controversial sports and pop culture blog originally founded in Massachusetts. Though this exhibition, albeit inspired by Barstool, is not at all concerned with it, the framing of the show is a bit misleading, distracting the viewer from seeing what this exhibition really is, which is a lot of marvelously made quilts.

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  “Barstool Sports” is on view at LaiSun Keane Gallery, 460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, through October 27, 2024.