Heather Saunders- It's A Girl!

I'm very proud to present the inaugural exhibition at She Said Boom! Window Space for the month of May...please be sure to pass by and take a look!

Heather Saunders
It’s a Girl!

May 1^st-31^st, 2007
She Said Boom! Window Space
372 College Street
Toronto

Caught in a state of flux, these abstractions of cocoons are both breaking free and being further bound by layers of stitching and layers of fabric. They are made from girls’ baby clothes, women’s lingerie, and hybrids of the two, in an attempt to emphasize their shared signifiers, such as colour, sensual fabrics and floral imagery. The newest additions to the series incorporate girls’ baby clothes that contain text, as an exploration of the messages of socialization imposed, ironically, on a preliterate group.

Heather Saunders has a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History from Sheridan College and the University of Toronto. At the University of Toronto, she is completing a Masters in Library and Information Studies and will be starting a Masters in History of Art this fall. She is a former director of White Water Gallery (North Bay, Ontario) and the current publisher of FUSE magazine. (Toronto, Ontario).

For more information, contact:
Tara Bursey
She Said Boom! Window Space
ssbwindowspace@hotmail.com

Michael Comeau at the Toronto Zine Library

The Toronto Zine Library is holding their second in-library event on April 29th, and it should be a fantastic one. Try to make it out!

The Toronto Zine Library presents:
A talk with guest speaker
Michael Comeau

Sunday, April 29th, 1:30pm
at the TRANZAC
292 Brunswick Avenue, south of Bloor.
Toronto

Please join us for a talk with special guest zine-maker Michael Comeau hosted by the TZL Collective at the Toronto Zine Library. In his talk, Michael will talk about his personal history with zines, and how his involvement with zine culture has informed his work as a professional artist and screenprinter.

Michael Comeau is a Toronto-based printmaker and poster artist , and is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design. In addition to his work as an artist, he has been a zine-maker for many years and was formerly the director of Cut'N'Paste zine fair as well as the Penny Arcade Print Shoppe and Gallery in Kensington Market. His recent projects include a solo show, Excretion Escapades, at Magic Pony and the curation of Regal Beast, a series of art anthologies.

The Toronto Zine Library is run by a collective of zine readers, zine makers and librarians who are commited to making zines more accessible in Toronto. We believe that zines are still an important method of communication that should be cherished, protected and promoted. Our aim is to do this through our public collection of zines, conducting related workshops at our physical library and abroad, and by holding events that promote zines as a method of open communtication and free expression.

For more information, please contact torontozinelibrary@hotmail.com
Or consult our website/online catalogue: http://www.sitekreator.com/zinelibrary

Temple II

Here is a portion of a statement I am writing about the Temple dresses...

TEMPLE I and TEMPLE II are fibre works involving two modified dresses. Though appearing to be relatively normal from far away, both dresses actually have had all of their horizontally-running threads (save for very few) removed. Through the act of removing these threads, the dress is in fact only half a dress- destroyed and stripped of it’s function yet remaining completely intact.

These works were inspired by the book The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima. The novel involves a young stuttering acolyte who becomes obsessed with the beauty of the Golden Temple where he is apprenticing to become a priest. Enraptured by the temple’s perfection and filled with self-loathing, the acolyte sets the temple on fire in a desperate attempt to free himself from the bonds of the structures magnificence, which serves as a monument to his own imperfection.

The TEMPLE dresses relate the themes of Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion- obsession and fetish, ritual and body image- to the contemporary female experience. The act of removing each horizontal thread by hand parallels repetitive (and often painful) beauty rituals such as plucking, waxing and hair-brushing. The intentional preservation of the vertical threads cheekily suggest the old adage about vertical stripes being slimming, while also evoking self-harm scars and long fair hair.

Local Calls For Submission

Call for Submission:
Alleyjaunt
Deadline: May 1, 2007.

ALLEYJAUNT is Toronto's alternative, urban, community arts event. Through the transformation of garages and alleys into exhibition spaces, ALLEYJAUNT gives exposure to local artists, encourages public interaction with art, integrates contemporary art into public space, and reaches out to a diverse community of all ages within the Trinity Bellwoods Park neighbourhood setting.

ALLEYJAUNT invites artists and collectives to submit proposals for 2007. We are soliciting proposals for garage exhibitions as well as proposals for installations, performances and other works that animate the park and alleyway spaces. ALLEYJAUNT supports experimentation and collaboration within contemporary art, and we are open to diverse media and practices.

We are seeking projects that touch upon one or several of these criteria:

• Projects designed for a specific site (garage, alley, park, etc.)
• Projects that connect the diverse community that uses the garage and alley spaces
• Projects that provide critical reflection on the nature of urban experience
• Artistic interventions that captures the flux, chance and accident of everyday life.

Proposals will be evaluated according to the critical merit of the overall theme/concept, the adherence to ALLEYJAUNT'S mandate, and the feasibility of the project
The 5th annual ALLEYJAUNT will be held on August 11 & 12, 2007

Submission Requirements
CV & Bio
Description of proposed work, including space required
5 - 8 images of representative work in jpg format)
Please send all written & visual material on a CD
Include SASE if you want support material returned

Please send submissions to:
ALLEY JAUNT
17 Bank Street
Toronto, ON

M6K 1R4

Queries: info@alleyjaunt.com www.alleyjaunt.com


Call for Submission:
BIG little fibre FIBRE
at the Gladstone Hotel

The Gladstone Hotel invites artists working in fibre-related media to submit proposals for installations and wall-hung works for the Gladstone's second annual show of textile-based art.

BIG little fibre FIBRE, will look at assumptions about fibre and size, and fibre and applications. Artists are invited to explore and explode the assumptions and expectations that come with the medium and to submit works at the extremes of size and format - the very large and the very small from the outer reaches of the realm of fibre.

BIG little fibre FIBRE will run from Thursday October 11 2007 to Sunday November 25 2007. The wall-hung works will be shown on the third and fourth floors of the hotel for the full run of the show, and, to launch the show with a bang, the second floor will be dedicated to extreme scale installations for the first four days - 11 to 14 October 2007.

For more information: www.gladstonehotel.com/callsforinterest.html

Chris Mitchell, Marketing, Communications, and Exhibitions
Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON
M6J 1J6
416-531-4635 Ext. 7105
chrism@gladstonehotel.com