When I was eight years old, I had a friend named Sandra. One day she came to my house to play. Within minutes of arriving, she pulled a see-through plastic take-out container out of her pink shoulder bag. “This is my kit,” she told me. Inside the container were the following items: a folded-up tissue, a length of green string, three maple keys, a black marble, a cut-out photograph of a overflowing basket of apples from a magazine, a tiny fabric doll and a Ritz cracker. I remember being jealous of Sandra’s kit. I tried to make one of my own, but it didn’t work out. There was something about hers-- maybe the way the tissue was folded, creating the perfect little bed for the doll-- that made it better, and far more alive than mine.
When I was nineteen years old, I moved into my second apartment on Maynard Avenue in Parkdale. It was an eight-story apartment building, and most of its tenants were over fifty. After moving my things into the unit’s smaller bedroom on my first night there, I decided to start hanging my clothes in the closet. As I was preparing to fold my freshly-purchased-and-unused towels (organized by the colours of the rainbow, of course) and put them on the top shelf of the closet, I noticed something red pushed to the very back corner of the shelf. I jumped to grab for it, and upon realizing what it was, my heart jumped out of my chest. I threw it back onto the shelf and slammed the door shut. The object was a used, strappy red high heel shoe. It may as well have been a dismembered limb. Later that night, I got my boyfriend to retrieve the shoe and throw it away.
These stories attest to the potency of objects. We connect with used and found everyday objects because of the traces of human life they contain. While we consume images, facts, and pseudo-facts in abundance on a daily basis, the voiceless, tangible stuff of everyday life contains the real truth or our existence but lacks the means to tell it. In an age of infinite information, are the secret lives of objects one of the last facets of our lives that have not been laid bare?
In the exhibition Odds and Entries, objects of ambiguous origin are contained in a series of salvaged drawers. Some of the interventions are as subtle as whispers—one drawer’s interior is adorned with a single spider web made of human hair, simultaneously evoking a sense of intimate human presence, desolation and loss. Another drawer contains a surreal, illuminated campground dreamscape, and another a forest of rotating cocktail umbrellas. While one drawer alludes to a pointedly domestic space, the others feel like strange and fantastical hybrids of space that is public and private, indoor and outdoor, sensual as well as mechanical. Another drawer plays with the idea of bodily detritus, attraction and repulsion, but to a more absurd and suggestive end.
Odds and Entries, like the closet with the red shoe and Sandra’s kit, involve containment as a way of isolating objects in order to give them new meaning. Situating work in repositories associated with the domestic realm-- as well as the exhibition’s emphasis on organic discovery-- defies conventions of gallery display and arrangement. The fact that the installation is situated in a raw, subterranean space further defies such conventions, while hinting at the role of our subconscious as a guide through the objects we encounter. Most importantly, the work presents us with objects and environments shrouded in ambiguity. While we can never know the true histories of the objects we happen upon by chance, we can lose ourselves in their mystery and meditate on their impact. In doing so, we not only allow ourselves to see the hidden life in inanimate objects, but can gain insight into our own lives and the lives of others.
November 4 - December 12
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 4th, 7:30 – 9:30 pm
Panel Discussion: Thursday, November 4th, 6:00 – 7:30 pm. The Great Hall, 1087 Queen St W, Toronto
Fresh, Local, Craft! is an exhibition that fuses community-building and environmental activism with the processes of craft making. Springing from a fruitful partnership, Fresh, Local, Craft! also constitutes the final tour stop for the Greenbelt Quilt of Possibilities project. The Quilt project originated through the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation’s request for assistance in creating a community work that celebrates and advocates for Ontario’s protected Greenbelt space. In response, the OCC organized and implemented the project with Kate Busby as curator, and has been running a tour of the Quilt throughout 2010 with noteworthy stops at Queen’s Park and the G8 Summit in Muskoka.
Underlying the connection between quilt-making and community building is the more widespread movement of craft as a popular medium for activism, where craftspeople and artists engage their creativity as a tool for change. Local economies, sustainability, recycling and up-cycling are addressed in different techniques, media and processes to question dominant norms of consumerism, worth and health. The Quilt contributors deal with these issues in their donated textile squares and reflections, and in Fresh, Local, Craft! their voices are accompanied by ten artists whose work expands on the question of stewardship through textiles, glass, ceramic, paper, wood and metal.
Fresh, Local, Craft! explores the dynamic between individual and communal processes of making in response to our relationship with the local environment. It celebrates the positive role that the Greenbelt plays in our lives, including its ability to bridge urban and rural life with the preservation of Ontario’s rich natural environment. Perhaps most importantly, the exhibition points in a direction where objects, food, air, water and soil are integrated into a society that no longer takes them for granted.
Fresh, Local, Craft! includes the work of: Glenna Agnew, Wendy Anderson Breedveld, Lizz Aston, Jayne Barrett, Tara Bursey, the Burr House Spinners and Weavers Guild, Maggie Butterfield Dickinson, Karen Chisvin, Natalie Drajewicz, Lise Downe, Roisin Fagan, Evann Frisque, Brette Gabel, Judy Gingrich, Fabienne Good, Margaret Gurica Hannigan, Clayton Haigh, Philip Hare, Beverley Hastings, Linda Heron, Pat Hertzberg, Kate Hunter, Mark Jaroszewicz, Sheila Jonah, Colleen Kennedy, Jen Kneulman, Mary Kroetsch, Katherine Laco, Sophia Lada, Kathy Lakatos, Kaitalin Lawford, Lory MacDonald, Nola McConnan, Valerie McLean, Karen Menzies, Lee Meszoros, Midori Nagai, Stacey Olson, Janet Patterson, Dorie Preston, Laura Preston, Julia Prime, Louisa Pucci, Danielle Reddick, Mary Ann Rich, Jean Pierre Schoss, Alison Seale, Brenda Secord, Don Stinson, Anastasia Tiller, Cheryl Trudeau, Catherine Vamvakas Lay, Linda Varekamp, Mary Walker, Wendy, Wallace, Helena Wehrstein, Liz Wilde, Erica Wilson, and Sandi Wong.
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In this exhibition, Barbara Balfour has invited thirteen artists who have worked in various forms of print media to respond to the notion of Printing Errors. They include: Janice Carbert, Shannon Gerard, Libby Hague, Micah Lexier, Patrick Mahon, Eric Mathew, Ken Nicol, Lauren Nurse, Dan Olsen, Derek Sullivan, Jeannie Thib, Daryl Vocat, and Joy Walker.
Once one moves beyond the detection of error – the dismay and disappointment of one’s own error or the Schadenfreude of detecting someone else’s – what can be done with it? Above all, can printing errors be interesting?
"Geometry of Circles" is a series of unnumbered animation pieces created for Sesame Street in 1979 with music by Philip Glass.
The shorts consist of the movement of six circles (each with a different color of the rainbow) that are formed by and split up into various geometric patterns. Glass's music underscores the animation in a style that closely resembles the "Dance" numbers and the North Star vignettes written during the same time period as his Einstein on the Beach opera.
On a broader scale, this same idea relates to the concept of ownership. How much can we really claim to “own” our ideas? The repeating, reworking and re-contextualizing of ideas from the past is part of the postmodern condition. So many ideas have come to fruition over the course of history…when we make something, what are the odds that it hasn’t been made before? Anyone who has come across the work of another artist that is uncannily similar to their own knows what it means to have their sense of ownership over an idea thwarted.
How can we as artists deal with this sense that we cannot truly “own” our work? Perhaps the solution is to forfeit ownership altogether.
My piece, Crossed Stitches, explores these ideas. Using two very similar pattern samples as inspiration—one is by William Morris, and one is by a contemporary independent textile design studio called Terrain—I went through the painstaking process of creating accurate and fully-functional cross-stitch patterns that correspond to each design. This process involved transferring each design onto a large grid and translating each pattern so that it is comprised of squares on a grid. These large-scale grid drawings were then used to make a cross-stitch pattern on another piece of grid paper, dividing the colours of the pattern into symbols as “real” cross-stitch patterns do. This final pattern was then included in hand-made cross-stitch kits which include embroidery floss, a needle and canvas, so people can make their own William Morris or Terrain cross-stitched “fabric swatches.”
This piece plays with ideas of ownership (as well as consumerism and trends in art and design) in a number of ways. Crossed Stitches is a piece of work I have done based on the work of two other artists/designers. One might argue that the Terrain design was derivative of the William Morris design. If one was to take one of my William Morris cross-stitch kits and complete it, how much of the finished piece is considered their work, my work, or the work of William Morris? At the root of this work is the inevitability of “shared ownership” as a part of the current climate of making creative work in any media.
