Hamilton Winterfest

There are some very exciting exhibitions on the horizon in Hamilton that I'm involved with that may be of interest to those in the area engaged in the often intersecting worlds of art and heritage. I'm putting on another outdoor exhibition as part of Hamilton Winterfest this February. On The Waterfront, as well as Things Made Here are unique shows that celebrate material culture and local history. See below, as well as Tourism Hamilton's website for more details!

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On The Waterfront
A Hamilton Winterfest Exhibition

Lesley Loksi Chan

Fwee Twade (Becky Katz and Matt McInnes)

Hopkins Duffield

Carey Jernigan and Julia Campbell-Such

Aaron Oussoren

C. Wells

To be on the waterfront is to be on the threshold of something. The waterfront is where settlers landed, and early trade took place. In the 19th Century, the area surrounding Pier 8 was home to some of the city’s first industrial sites, among them an iron works, boat works, sail loft and glass company. In On the Waterfront, industrial sites will serve as points of departure for contemporary artists from around and outside of the region. Evocative outdoor installations will draw on skills, materials and forms associated with early industry, as well as the social history of the neighbourhood. This exhibition will consider the Hamilton’s waterfront as a site of historical significance, tension and possibility, as well as a place where past stories and dreams of the future collide.

At the Hamilton Winterfest Kick-Off Event: February 7, 2015
12:00pm – 8:00pm

Pier 8, Hamilton


Things Made Here: The Collection of Glen Faulman
January 31 to March 21 2015
AGH Design Annex
118 James Street North, Hamilton

Glen Faulman (AKA The Hamilton Kid) is a 10th generation Hamiltonian and a 3rd generation steelworker. He is also part owner of This Ain’t Hollywood on James Street North—needless to say he has great pride in this city, and in particular, the things made here. Glen’s goal is to collect “an artifact from every manufacturing plant that ever operated in Hamilton,” which would be a number approaching a thousand.

On view at the AGH Design Annex are selections from his extensive collection of objects made in Hamilton. From a late 19th century sewing machine produced at a factory formerly located at James Street North and Vine Street, to a stunning Hamilton cash register made on James Street North at Colbourne, to nail samples and graphic ads for soda pop and beer, these everyday artifacts will be familiar to long-time Hamiltonians. They are a stunning introduction for those less familiar. Three types of objects are on display: graphic designs used commercially, the things themselves that were produced, and the things to make things with, such as nails and other components.

At the AGH Design Annex, we provide a platform for contemporary local designers. This exhibition will situate newer pieces in the context of historic local production, with the goal of celebrating those aspects of graphic and industrial design that have stood the test of time.

Curated by Melissa Bennett (Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Hamilton) and Tara Bursey (Independent Curator).

Join us during Art Crawl on Friday February 13, from 7 pm to 11pm as we launch the exhibition Things Made Here: The Collection of Glen Faulman. Meet the Collector and revel in DJ Johnny Angel’s 78 Spin Out – playing all your favorite 78’s.

For more information:

http://www.tourismhamilton.com/festivals-events/winterfest-2015/art-winterfest-2

Supercrawl 2015 Call for Artist Submissions

This is a public service announcement on behalf of the Supercrawl Curatorial Committee!

Supercrawl 2015 Call for Artist Submissions


Deadline: Tuesday December 16, 2014


Supercrawl is a free annual outdoor art and music festival in downtown Hamilton, and the Supercrawl Curatorial Committee is excited to once again release our Call for Artists for 2015. Supercrawl celebrates the unique mix of arts organizations, cultures, businesses and creative people along James Street North in Hamilton. Last year Supercrawl attracted over 100,000 attendees and will continue to grow in scale in 2015.



The Supercrawl Curatorial Committee presents a wide variety of artistic projects at the annual James Street North Supercrawl. The goal of the committee is to curate contemporary public art which challenges site and context, as well as works that present new opportunities for access and engagement for Supercrawl attendees.



The committee selects projects by local, national and international artists based on artistic merit, originality, and ability to integrate within the festival's scale and energy. This committee reports to the Supercrawl Board of Directors. Since 2010, the committee has curated works in a variety of media, including projects by Dean Drever, Zeke Moores, Sean Martindale, BGL, Kelly Mark, Kim Adams, Max Streicher, and many others. Committee members are Melissa Bennett, Tara Bursey, Amy Kenny, Courtney Lakin, Ciara McKeown, Dane Pederson, Alana Traficante, Stephanie Vegh and Matthew Walker.



facebook.com/Supercrawl

instagram.com/supercrawl

youtube.com/user/JamesStSuperCrawl


supercrawl.tumblr.com


The Curatorial Committee invites artists working in a wide range of creative disciplines to propose works for installation as part next year's event, taking place on September 11-13, 2015.



The Committee is interested in seeking proposals in the following media:
Installation art
Sculpture
Video (projection-based is preferred)
Performance art
Public interventions
Storefront window installations
Murals
New media
Dance


Works will be installed in various locations along James Street North; in addition, the committee is looking to focus on works that can be installed within the following contexts:

Mural wall on west side of 20 Wilson Street
Various windows of buildings along James Street North
Street vinyl (adhesive vinyl art on pavement, walls or windows)
Silent video shorts
*Please email us for images and further details on the above sites.


Proposals must consider public safety, visibility, and that which can be safely performed, or executed outside with large crowds at anytime of day/night, and will remain impactful during both the daytime and night hours of the festival. Each project selected will be allocated an artist’s fee and production fee. Costs such as travel and accommodation, where necessary, may be covered and will be addressed on an individual basis; production assistance may also be available.



Submission Requirements

        1. Artist's statement—conceptual statement on the work (150 words maximum)
2. Practical explanation of the work—i.e. Scale, materials, methods, etc. Thought must be given to install plan and technical/logistical requirements, as well as cost considerations
3. Three images/stills/sketches of the proposed work, supported by 3-5 images of previous work relevant to the proposed project (jpeg, max. 72dpi, no larger than 768 x 1024 pixels). Include title, year, medium, dimensions for all images
4. A clip, link or digital copy of any video (10 minutes max), if applicable
5. A statement as to whether the proposed work has been exhibited before; if it has, please include details as to where and when
6. CV with mailing address, phone number and email contact information
7. Location suggestion for your work (optional)

The Supercrawl Curatorial Committee is open to creatively diverse work that has visual impact and responds to the streetscape of the event. Artists and their work will be identified and publicized as official Supercrawl curatorial selections during the event, on the Supercrawl website and in select media releases. Artists will be required to sign a contract with Supercrawl Productions Inc. The committee will contact selected artists in late January – early February 2015.



Send submissions to supercrawlart@gmail.com

Subject Line: YOUR NAME, SUPERCRAWL ART

Deadline for submissions is Tuesday December 16, 2014.

California

Carpet shop signage, West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles 

South African Embroidered Panel at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles 

Mexican Human Skull Mosaicwork, LACMA, Los Angeles 

Jenny's, Chinatown Alleyway, San Francisco 

Ricky Henderson Planter Mosaic, Temescal, Oakland 

 San Francisco Botanical Gardens, Golden Gate Park

Night palms in Westwood, Los Angeles 

Chris Burden and Me, LACMA, Los Angeles

Scenes from my time in California, September 2014.

Market Value at Hamilton Farmer's Market

This just in! This great thing will be happening at the Farmer's Market over a week in March.  I have something in store for the Saturday, but will be spending time at the Market in the weeks preceding the event interviewing market vendors in order to make the work that will be produced on my market day.  

For more on this project and the participating artists, see this post on the Hamilton Arts Council's blog.

Winterlore

 TH&B Collective, Bay Man

Floyd Elzinga, Silver Cones

Jacqui Oakley and Jamie Lawson, Awakening

 Thea Haines, Blanket Fort

 Tonya Hart, Phantasmagorical Nights

 Kosa Kolektiv

Hitoko Okada, Lotus Lantern

Winterlore was an overwhelming success at the Hamilton Winterfest kick off event yesterday. Thanks to the all the amazing participating artists (Floyd Elzinga, Hitoko Okada, Jacqui Oakley and Jamie Lawson, the TH&B Collective, Thea Haines and Tonya Hart) for making the exhibition what it was. I'd also like to thank Werner Plessl, NJT Productions for the lighting, Jamie and Ryan of the Waterfront Trust, Alex (security guard extraordinaire), Ken Coit, Ben Needham and my friend and collaborator Jen Anisef, Cultural Projects Specialist at the City of Hamilton for being a huge support through the entire process.

Hamilton Winterfest is a city-wide initiative that runs until February 9th.  For more information on what's happening, look here.  Also, the Winterlore-associated exhibition Meryl McMaster: In-Between Worlds runs until the end of March at the AGH Design Annex.  Don't forget to check it out!

Winterlore at Hamilton Winterfest 2014

 Tonya Hart

 Thea Haines

Since a mere three weeks after moving to Hamilton in August, I've been working on this exhibition of outdoor art for the 36th annual Hamilton Winterfest at Pier 8.  I am proud to be a part of the first year that Winterfest has had an increased arts and culture focus, with an amazing roster of events happening from February 1st - 9th.  See below for details on Winterlore, affiliated arts programming at Lister Block and the AGH Design Annex, and the Winterfest website for more details about the events at the kick-off and the programming happening across Hamilton for nine whole days.

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Winterlore, an exciting exhibition of outdoor art, is on view for one day only as part of the Hamilton Winterfest Kick-Off event at Pier 8 (47 Discovery Drive) on February 1, 2014, from 3:00-10:00 pm.

Curated by Tara Bursey, Winterlore features the work of six artists and collectives who have drawn on winter folklore, stories and symbols from Hamilton, Ontario and around the world to create dynamic installations. In line with the Winterfest program, this exhibition serves as a celebration of the diverse cultures of Hamilton and the beauty and magic of the wintertime.

Winterlore features the work of visual artists:

Floyd Elzinga (Beamsville)
Hitoko Okada (Hamilton)
Jacqui Oakley and Jamie Lawson (Hamilton)
TH&B Collective--Simon Frank, Ivan Jurakic, Tor Lukasik-Foss and Dave Hind (Hamilton)
Thea Haines (Hamilton)
Tonya Hart (Toronto)

The Winterlore Facebook event page can be found here.

Though the Kick-Off event will feature the majority of Winterlore artists in a temporary display at Pier 8 on February 1st, there are two longer term opportunities to see winter-inspired art offsite:

Presented in association with Winterlore by the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s AGH Design Annex, Meryl McMaster: In-Between Worlds runs from February 1st to March 22nd, 2014 at 118 James Street North. In-Between Worlds is an exhibition of work by emerging Canadian photographer Meryl McMaster, curated by Melissa Bennett and Tara Bursey. The artist’s Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian heritage are explored in her works through photographs of a lone figure in the winter landscape, where identity and myth are intertwined.
http://merylmcmaster.com/home.html
http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.com/da_index.php

A whimsical winter village is on display for a month in a heritage vitrine on the 1st floor of the Lister Block as of January 10, 2014 featuring work from thread artist Amanda McCavour (courtesy of Lonsdale Gallery, Toronto) and the Beehive Craft Collective.
http://www.amandamccavour.com/
http://www.beehivecraftcollective.ca/ 

For more information, visit www.hamiltonwinterfest.ca, email jen.anisef@hamilton.ca, or call (905) 546-2424 ext. 7612.
http://www.tourismhamilton.com/festivals-events/winterfest-2014

Supercrawl 2014 Call for Submissions

Sarah Beck and Shlomi Greenspan, Untitled (It's almost a one liner), 2013. Photo: Harry Gils

Speaking as a Curatorial Committee member of Hamilton Supercrawl, I'd like to present the following PSA.  Hamilton Supercrawl wants YOU to submit proposals of art for this year's event.  Supercrawl is a breathtaking art and music extravaganza-- see below for more information on the festival if you are not familiar.  In addition, if you'd like even more info as well as tips on applying, the Curatorial Committee is holding a free info session tomorrow at the AGH Design Annex for potential applicants. See details about that below as well.

Supercrawl 2014 Call for Artist Submissions
Deadline: January 31, 2014

Supercrawl is a free annual outdoor art and music festival in Hamilton. The Curatorial Committee invites artists working in a wide range of creative disciplines to propose works for installation as part next year's event, taking place on September 12-13, 2014. Supercrawl celebrates the unique mix of arts organizations, cultures, businesses and creative people along James Street North in Hamilton. Last year Supercrawl attracted 100,000 attendees and will continue to grow in scale in 2014. The Committee is interested in seeing proposals in the following media:

Installation art
Sculpture
Video (projection-based is preferred)
Performance art
Public interventions
Storefront window installations
Murals
New media
Dance

Please note that a priority will be placed on that which can be safely seen, performed, or executed outside, and will remain impactful during both the daytime and night hours of the festival. Each project selected will be allocated an artist’s fee and modest budget.

Submission Requirements:

Please send via email:
1.     Artist's statement—conceptual statement on the work (150 words maximum)
2.     Practical explanation of the work—i.e. Scale, materials, methods, etc.
3.     Three images/stills/sketches of the proposed work, supported by 3-5 images of previous work relevant to the proposed project (jpeg, max. 72dpi, no larger than 768 x 1024 pixels)
4.     A clip, link or digital copy of any video (10 minutes max), if applicable
5.     Title, year, medium, dimensions for all images
6.     Complete installation plan including details of time needed for installation and removal of work as well as tools, equipment and number of assistants needed
7.     Location suggestion for your work (optional)
8.     A statement as to whether the proposed work has been exhibited before; if it has, please include details as to where and when
9.     CV with mailing address, phone number and email contact information

The Supercrawl Curatorial Committee is open to creatively diverse work that has visual impact and responds to the streetscape of the event. Artists and their work will be identified and publicized as official Supercrawl curatorial selections during the event, on the Supercrawl website and in select media releases. The committee will contact selected artists within six weeks following the deadline.

Artist information meeting: Wednesday January 8, 2014, 7-8 pm, AGH Design Annex, 118 James Street North, Hamilton. The Supercrawl Curatorial Committee will provide information about the event and answer artists’ questions in preparation for their submissions.

Send submissions to supercrawlart@gmail.com
Subject Line: YOUR NAME, SUPERCRAWL  ART
Deadline for submissions is January 31, 2014

About the Supercrawl Curatorial Committee:

The Supercrawl Curatorial Committee presents a wide variety of artistic projects at the annual James Street North Supercrawl. The goal of the committee is to curate public art installations and performances in keeping with Supercrawl's diversity, energy and scale. The committee selects projects by local, national and international artists based on artistic merit, originality, and ability to engage our diverse audience. This committee reports to the Supercrawl Board of Directors. Since 2010, the committee has curated works in a variety of media, including works by BGL, Kelly Mark, Kim Adams, Max Streicher, Elinor Whidden, Shayne Dark, Adam David Brown, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Gareth Lichty, the McMaster Cybernetic Laptop Orchestra, Chris Shepherd, Shake-N-Make Collective, TH&B, Adad Hannah, EN MASSE, Brandon Vickerd, C.R. Avery and others. Current committee members are Melissa Bennett, Tara Bursey, Amy Kenny, Courtney Lakin, Dane Pederson, Alana Traficante, Stephanie Vegh and Matthew Walker.

www.facebook.com/Supercrawl
https://twitter.com/supercrawl
http://instagram.com/supercrawl
http://supercrawl.tumblr.com/

Toronto Hyperbolic Crochet Reef at Gallery 1313

December's Window Box installation at Gallery 1313 is well-timed considering it was a topic of discussion during Shannon's artist talk at the inaugural Pulling Strings event in Hamilton.  The Toronto Hyperbolic Crochet Reef is an ongoing community project originally conceived by four Toronto artsy crafters closely connected to the amazing City of Craft fair (also happening in December just down the street from Gallery 1313!).  Read on for details about this inspiring, growing installation.  The exhibition reception is tomorrow night!  Also, check out the THCR blog for info on how you can contribute your own hyperbolic forms to the reef.

Also, a reminder: only 3 more days to check out the multimedia works of another Gallery 1313 project, Telling: An Audio Survey of Parkdale before the disappear on the 30th.

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The Toronto Hyperbolic Crochet Reef
Gallery 1313 Window Box
December 2013

Reception: Thursday, November 28th, 7-10pm

The Toronto Hyperbolic Crochet Reef is a collective project of endless crochet for the city of Toronto. Inspired by the pioneering work in hyperbolic crochet of Dr. Daina Taimina and the artful modelling projects of the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles, the Toronto Reef is just one in a great confluence of reefs worldwide that use craft and community art to address the problems of global warming and plastic oceanic trash. The reef is run and mostly built by Angelune Des Lauriers, Shannon Gerard, Kalpna Patel and Becky Johnson but it remains open to coral contributions from anyone in the city.  The Toronto Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef has been exhibited at City of Craft, Roadside Attractions, Fly Gallery, The Knit Cafe and at White Elephant as part of Hamilton Supercrawl.

http://torontohyperbolicreef.blogspot.ca/








1313 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON. M6K 1L8
Hours: Wed – Sun, 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Phone: 416-536-6778
http://www.g1313.org

Telling: An Audio Survey of Parkdale

November is almost upon us, as are three exhibitions I've been working away on for the past few months!  First up: An exhibition of audio art in public spaces around one of my very favourite Toronto neighbourhoods, Parkdale.  See below for details.

TELLING: AN AUDIO SURVEY OF PARKDALE

Various venues around Parkdale

November 6th-30th

Reception: November 7th, 7-10pm


Panel Talk: November 13th, 7pm

Curated by Phil Anderson and Tara Bursey


With participating artists: Luis Jacob, Myfanwy Ashmore, Zeesy Powers, Shannon Gerard, Paul Aloisi and Jaclyn Meloche

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” 

― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Telling: An Audio Survey of Parkdale is an exhibition of site-specific audio works that will animate familiar and hidden spaces across Parkdale. Each participating artist has chosen a different site along Queen Street West as a starting point to engage and explore the history and character of one of Toronto’s most storied and diverse neighbourhoods. This exhibition pays tribute to the real and mythic spaces, stories and people important to the exhibition’s participating artist/residents.

This exhibition will tell the story of the Pigeon Lady of Parkdale, a local landlady who was known to feed hundreds of pigeons that would flock to her street corner each day. The sound of pigeons outside of Capitol Espresso will serve as an aural memorial for one of the neighbourhood’s former residents. In Gallery 1313’s courtyard, a representation of horses using sound and visuals recalls where police horses were led to the back stable house, a space which is part of the current home of Gallery 1313.  At Bacchus Roti, the sounds of the Gardiner Expressway-- which when created caused several hundred Parkdale homes to be demolished for its construction-- is juxtaposed with an image of the lakeshore, serving as a reminder of the often complicated relationship between nature and the built environment. These and other stories conjured by participating artists will reside with the public as works of art, encouraging current residents to tell and trade their own stories, thus taking an active role in the creation of a collective community history.

A panel discussion featuring Judith Doyle (Professor, OCADU), Shawn Micallef (Author/Editor/Co-Owner, Spacing Magazine; Columnist, the Toronto Star) and Darren Copeland (Artistic Director, New Adventures in Sound Art [NAISA]) will invite the public to engage in discussion about the works featured in the exhibition, as well as the use of audio technology in contemporary art practices. Moderator will be Russell Smith, cultural writer for the Globe and Mail and author of several books.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with the following local businesses: Capitol Espresso, Bacchus Roti.

Media contact: 

Phil Anderson, Director, Gallery 1313 

416-536-6778 or 647-918-6606

http://www.g1313.org

The End (Seven Samurai)

My window installation at Gallery 1313 opened last night.  Thanks to director Phil Anderson for giving me access to the space (for my own work as well as for the windows I'll be programming for the next few months), and special thanks to Noa Bronstein for writing the following short essay to accompany the installation.

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Tara Bursey
The End (Seven Samurai)
Rice, black and white sesame seeds, adhesive
2013

A menacing term, the end is the semantic comrade of termination and expiration. The end, however, is also but a provocation to look to other beginnings. In her work The End (Seven Samurai), Tara Bursey uses the matter of beginning – seed, bean and grain – and stages it as an interloper into the rubric of finality. The End (Seven Samurai) is part of a larger series exhibited at the Gladstone Hotel in 2012 for the exhibition //THE ANNUAL//, in which Bursey has recreated the end credit from four black and white Hollywood films using various edible materials. The End performs Bursey’s concern with the insecurity of food production in the wake of mass environmental shifts and devastations. For this iteration, the end title of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), in which bandits pillage a rural, farming village, is faithfully realized.

The End points to a liminality of time and space. Re-purposing easily accessible food stocks, at least in the context in which the works are created, through meticulous processes, challenges our relationship to production and consumption. The labour of harvesting these staples, whether by hand or machine, is recast through the labour of the artist and consumed only metaphysically, rendering field and fork as partial actors. The End further points to a cultural lament for the passage of time and the need to compartmentalize the contemporary and the historic, the past and the present. Inspired by what Bursey has called the illusionary space of film, the titles evoke a lost age of and nostalgia for the belle epoque of cinema and great moments of chimera, echoing that this nostalgia might soon be turned towards our ecologies. Returning for a moment to Kurosawa’s bandits, these antagonists are not merely a metaphor for food insecurity. The bandits are perhaps a reminder of Roland Barthes’ pronouncement that “myth is always a language-robbery.”1  The appropriation of The End is a kind of language-robbery, through which we can mythologize cinema, nature and time.

The end credit can be seen as a signifier for the moment of fertilization, whereby the filmic narrative is transferred from auteur to the subconscious of the viewer. Seeds are a codex for living matter, as films are a codex for narrative, giving form to ideation. The matter of seed is both beginning and end, in the same way that the end credit of a film is only the beginning of our relationship to it.

Noa Bronstein
Director of Exhibitions & Cultural Promotions
Gladstone Hotel

1  Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 131. 

The Encampment

I was lucky to catch The Encampment-- a massive temporary public art piece by artist collaborators (as well as a huge number of contributing artists) Thomas+Guinevere a couple of weeks ago at Fort York.  200 tents were placed on the grounds of Fort York-- site of The War of 1812-- which served as individual sites for artistic interventions.  The project's handout explained that each tent installation was inspired by real individuals living in the Canadas during the war.  As compelling as some of the tent installations were, for me the real power in the installation was the sight of the 200 tents together on a historic site against the backdrop of the changing city.

Though the tents were (for me) a thoroughly engaging evocation of Canada's history, I can't help but also see them a bittersweet metaphor for my own vague alienation and feelings of displacement in the city I was born in as it changes more everyday.

Rochester Trip

Took a quick trip across the pond to Rochester, New York last week.  The weather was sort of craptastic (mostly cold and damp), but it was a really cool trip nonetheless.  Rochester is a tiny city, with lots of neat art deco/art moderne architecture.  The Kodak Building, the firehall on Chestnut Avenue and this old Chevrolet dealership (?) turned coffee shop in downtown Rochester's east end were highlights, for sure.

While I was there, I managed to take in a lot of art in both expected and unexpected places.  I went to the George Eastman House (Eastman was founder of Kodak, which is based in Rochester) which is a museum of photography and film situated in an old ivy-covered mansion.  There was an exhibition up which featured a number of photographic medallions from the early 20th Century such as the one above (scooped from the George Eastman House Flickr page).  There was another small exhibition called Ballyhoo, which focused on promotional materials and signage from the golden age of film and was particularly neat.  The one thing that irked me about Eastman House was it's lack of wayfinding information-- after leaving, we realized that we had missed two of the museum's exhibitions entirely.  Rats!

One of our other stops was the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, which had a great show up called Work It: Artists Address Labour and Unemployment.  It was nice to see pieces from Kathryn Clark's Foreclosure Quilt series up in this show, which I had only previously seen through images online.  Also got to meet the gallery's plucky Director, who introduced himself and chatted for a while.  Nice dude!  Don't think that's ever happened to me in Toronto...!

Our first night there, we ventured into the amazing abandoned Rochester Subway tunnel with the friend we were staying with armed with only a single flashlight and about $10 (goes a long way in the U.S.) worth of alcohol . Apparently people go down into the tunnel all the time to explore-- there was a ton of graffiti down there.  The above patch was particularly unusual.

This trip to Rochester made me miss Baltimore quite a bit, and reminded me how much smaller American cities have to offer.  Canadians generally want to go to places like New York City and San Francisco on vacation-- understandably so, but smaller American cities seem to really have their own unique identity and a slew of neat things to check out that can be found pretty easily.  I'm looking forward to going on more quick and dirty trips like this just south of the border in the future-- next up is Detroit, hopefully.

Charles Ledray

Charles Ledray is a Seattle-born artist I became interested in while working at the Textile Museum last summer.  I've been bogged down with school stuff for the past week and haven't posted anything in a while, so here is a little piece I wrote for an assignment about the work pictured above entitled workworkworkworkwork, first exhibited in 1991.  FYI: I will be building a "fantasy exhibition" of sorts around this work for a curating class.

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Charles Ledray
workworkworkworkwork, 1991
588 objects: Fabric, thread, cotton batting, yarn, embroidery floss, nylon cord, carpet, leather, wood, metal, foil, metal chain, wire, nails, porcelain, pumice, beads, buttons, cardboard, corrugated cardboard, paper, magic marker, paint
Approximately 13.7 m x 25.4 cm x 5 cm
Private Collection, Houston, TX

Charles Ledray is an artist working primarily in the area of fibre-base sculpture and installation.  His work is characterized by labour-intensive and somewhat obsessive tendencies towards hand making.  A compelling blend of high-art and craft, his best-known works are installations comprised of handmade men’s suits, hats, fantastical garments and ceramic vessels that play with multiplicity and scale.  In his installation workworkworkworkwork (1991), 588 miniature objects-- among them garments, magazines, housewares and multiple pieces of art-- were displayed in New York’s Astor Place in the form of an impromptu street sale.  Each of the objects was painstakingly hand-crafted by Ledray, and their presentation on a busy sidewalk-- often splayed across shrunken replicas of flattened cardboard boxes and rumpled raincoats-- cleverly blurred the lines between art and mass-produced object.  The individual objects themselves are an enigmatic combination of abjection and whimsy, like a half-inch dildo in a dollhouse.

Both the presentation and objects of workworkworkworkwork evoke a number of responses in the viewer.  The lack of human presence in the installation causes the objects to convey a sense of melancholy and loneliness, imploring one to piece together biographical details of the hypothetical owners of each cluster of tiny belongings for sale. The objects are reminiscent of toys or props-- accessories for a Ken doll whose dream house was foreclosed and who is drifting from fleabag hotel to fleabag hotel.  Each object straddles the line between precious and imprecious, with grasshopper-sized hardcover novels standing spine up as if tossed aside among real cigarette butts on the sidewalk.  The centrality of labour is evident in the work, from Ledray’s labour to the title of the work to the work of people who labour to make mass-produced objects in sweatshops that move from multi-national chain store to church sale to sidewalk vendor to landfill.  Finally, the piece’s presentation on a public sidewalk is dependent on the presence of the pedestrian to complete the work.  This brings to mind how members of dominant society-- in the case of workworkworkworkwork, the Manhattan white-collar worker, socialite, window shopper, or tourist-- view people on the margins of society.  The homeless, street vendors and people performing menial jobs are relegated as background players against an urban backdrop, always viewed peripherally.  The miniaturization of the objects in workworkworkworkwork poignantly reflects this.

While it is easy to get completely caught up in the sense of wonder and delightful seediness of Ledray’s tiny sculptural stand-ins, a key to the work’s success lies in its presentation in public, on a sidewalk in a huge metropolis that dwarfs everything it contains. Situated in Manhattan-- an iconic American city which has long been seen as a centre of commerce, immigration, power and consumption-- workworkworkworkwork interacts with its site’s impressive web of history, from deadly industrial disasters in garment factories and riots fuelled by class resentment to the economic and social conditions of New York City in 1991 when workworkworkworkwork was first exhibited.  The relationship between the objects-- which despite their scale evoke personal histories that feel very real-- and the site activate something much larger than the diminutive objects laboured over by Ledray: a greater social history of a city that lies deeper than a sidelong glance during a brisk walk across a crowded intersection.

Photos courtesy of the Whitney's website: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/CharlesLeDray/Images

The Wall at the Back of the Theater

A couple of Sundays ago, I decided to do a performance for Occupy Baltimore-- Baltimore's version of the Wall Street Protests-- which started a few weeks ago in a public square in the Inner Harbour area of town. The performance was inspired by a project I was assigned in a performance class (I still have yet to do the actual assignment in class on Monday...this wasn't the school assignment) where we were asked to develop a character or alter ego.  For this piece in McKeldin Square, I became an out-of-work "popcorn lady" who lost her job because the theatre she worked at (In the present? In the 40s or 50s?  I'm not quite sure...) closed down.  The performance consisted of me kneeling on the ground for two hours, spelling out a long quote in popcorn kernels.  The quote belongs to the annoying, but highly quotable (Baltimore-born) Frank Zappa, who once said: "The Illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion.  At the point where the illusion becomes to expensive to maintain, they will take down the scenery...pull back the curtains...and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre."  The quote was slightly abridged from it's original form for the performance, for the sake of my knees and back.



This performance was obviously inspired by my time in Baltimore-- and the United States.  It is a crazy time to be here-- there have been protests across the country, and Baltimore itself has been a troubled city since the 1960s.  The downtown core of Baltimore is beautiful, but largely deserted.  There is poverty and blight everywhere.  While the arts community and a select few are fighting hard for the city to have a chance at a renaissance, it will be a long, hard road.  What are the odds that it will happen?  This is a city made for a million people, and the population has steadily declined since the 1970s to 620,000 people.  Poor Baltimore-- in so many ways, the city and its people have been really inspiring, but I leave for good in December.  I know it will haunt me, and I will wonder and worry about it as if it was a wayward friend.



On a lighter note, executing this piece was rough.  I did a somewhat similar performance with popcorn kernels last spring that took just under half as long, and that was hard enough.  Because the piece is at least partially about labour, the endurance aspect of the piece was fitting.  About a third of the way through the quote, this sweet little man offered me a bit of help.  He did one letter-- an F-- before I shoo-ed him away because he was slowing me down.  The poor guy was very disappointed, and reluctantly left me to my work after a while.  I really hit my stride after he left.



This was the first piece of "work" that has materialized since my arrival here, and I'm glad to have it more or less behind me. There is definitely more to come soon.  I'll end this post with the lyrics of a Randy Newman song I only just heard for the first time yesterday.  While my photos don't really illustrate the Baltimore this song speaks of, the idea of it is definitely simmering close the core of this piece.

Beat up little seagull

On a marble stair

Tryin' to find the ocean

Lookin' everywhere

Hard times in the city

In a hard town by the sea

Ain't nowhere to run to

There ain't nothin' here for free

Hooker on the corner

Waitin' for a train

Drunk lyin' on the sidewalk

Sleepin' in the rain

And they hide their faces

And they hide their eyes

'Cause the city's dyin'

And they don't know why

Oh Baltimore

Man it's hard just to live

Oh, Baltimore

Man, it's hard just to life, just to live

Robyn Love Interview on TCA

Conducted an interview with knit-ty multi-disciplinary artist Robyn Love last week in honour of the massive public art project that she was commissioned to do for the Cheongju International Craft Biennale. The interview was posted on TCA last Friday...read it and get inspired! http://torontocraftalert.ca/2011/09/23/questions-for-crafters-cheongju-robyn-love/

Image: Water Tower Cozy by Robyn Love, courtesy of her website.

Corn Maze Performance

Last week, I did a performance at Dundas Square with popcorn kernels.  I confess, this was an assignment for the one studio class I am taking in school this year, called Special Focus Studio: Nature, Transformation and Change.  The assignment simply required that we make a piece of work that references ecological art, bio art, and uses "light, weather, animal, vegetable or mineral" as material for a work of art.  Pretty familiar territory for me, I'd say!

My idea was to continue in the vein of the last piece of work for this class-- it involved a proposal for a piece of public art using cast Iroquois longhouse/greenhouse hybrid forms as a basis for three bronze sculptures across from a cluster of highrise buildings in my old neighbourhood in Scarborough. The project was rooted in ideas about urban food insecurity.  I was also thinking about recent work I've done with cornsilk, specifically the corn maze quilt square I made for the Greenbelt Foundation Quilt Project, sponsored by the Ontario Craft Council.  This is the short write up I did about my square, for the project's catalogue:


Corn Maze is a representation of an aerial view of a corn maze made out of the corn silk of Ontario-grown corn.  Corn mazes, like berry picking, are attractions commonly linked to agritourism or “agritainment.”  As a city-dweller, my experiences of the Greenbelt growing up were limited to such forms of contact with rural life.  Similarly, as an adult my connection to rural Ontario is almost entirely limited to my consumption of locally grown produce. Corn Maze pokes fun at my unabashedly urban relationship with Ontario’s countryside.

In doing further research on corn mazes, I came across photos of a number of corn/hedge mazes that served as enormous advertisements for McDonalds, Husky and Chevrolet, meant to be seen aerially.  To me, these rather perverse advertisements served as an apt metaphor for the omnipresence of corporate interests in the realm of food, from agriculture to food retail and brand power.  Corporations mediate out experiences with food-- it is disturbing to think that such a vital, elemental part of our lives is essentially constructed and informed by corporate interests.



I knew that I wanted to make an installation in a public space that used the idea of a corn maze as it's framework.  My objective was to make make a physical manifestation of this dichotomy of food experience as natural, nourishing, visceral and personal while also highly mediated.  I also was thinking about the ideas surrounding my original Corn Maze quilt square-- in an urban environment, our experiences of food involve us purchasing it as opposed to growing it.  How might one reconcile this distance from food's original source-- the farm, the earth-- through a performative gesture? Deciding on the right site was really important to the performance. After briefly considering laying a Corn Maze out in the parking lot of the Liberty Village location of Metro (where I do most of my grocery shopping), I decided that Dundas Square would be the best site due to it's proximity to so many billboards, signs, and for the square's general sense of insane media barrage.




So, for my performance I made a corn maze-- modelled after a corn maze drawing I did with corn silk on Kozo paper just under a year ago-- on the ground.  It ended up being about 10' X 10' large.  I used a Metro reusable shopping bag to carry about 30 lbs of kernels to Dundas Square...it was insanely heavy!  Being on my hands and knees for an hour was no easy task either, but the pain was eased slightly by the fact that many passers by stopped to look and chat as I was working.  Children tidied my stray kernels as I worked and distracted hungry pigeons by feeding them breadcrumbs.  One man-- who was awesome, and helped me clean up all my kernels with a shovel when I was done-- told me about how what I was doing reminded him of his wedding in the Philippines where coconut leaves were laid out in patterns on the ground as part of the ceremony.


 
There is a little more to this piece and my research for it than I will write about here.  I did a bit of research on GMOs and the artwork of Costa Rican artist Lucia Madriz, who does artwork with staple foods such as corn, beans and rice.  I also learned about some interesting parallel practices that are related to my installation, such as Navaho and Tibetian Sand Painting, as well as the Indian practice of Kolam, which is essentially sand painting with rice powder in order to invite birds and small insects and animals into the home in order to pay tribute to the harmonious co-existence of humans and animals.  All in all, making this installation was a great experience, and it has provided me with a number of ideas for more work with corn...work that will be a little easier on the knees, at that!


More pictures of the performance can be found on my Flickr page. All photos by B. Needham.  Thanks, Bo!

Three Sisters

I just finished the following assignment for school a day or so ago. The assignment was to propose a work of public artwork, which got me thinking about Scarborough, my old neighbourhood, and it's history, which I only had a vague idea about. The assignment gave me an excuse to delve a little further into said history-- specifically the history of the Iroquois in Scarborough-- as well as to explore a new side of my ongoing interest in food-y art.

Three Sisters

My idea for a work of public art stems from the history-- as well as my own experiences--of the Scarborough neighbourhood I grew up in. My project, entitled Three Sisters, attempts to draw a parallel between urban food insecurity, urban horticulture, and the history of subsistence farming practices of the early Iroquois in Ontario.

While growing up, I was always vaguely aware of the presence of a monument on a hill a few blocks away from the apartment building where I lived. In researching the monument and the history of early native inhabitants of Scarborough, I learned that in 1956, while steam-shovelling in the area preparing for the building of a new suburban subdivision, two Iroquois ossuaries were found near the intersection of Lawrence Avenue and Bellamy Road. The ossuaries were estimated to contain the bones of about 472 individuals The burial took place in about 1250 CE and was part of a Feast of the Dead ceremony, which typically took place at the time of village relocation. Shortly after discovering the ossuaries, the area was declared a historic site and a reburial service was performed by Six Nations chiefs. Today, Tabor Hill is now officially designated as a native cemetery ground. Additional research indicates that as early as 1100 CE, early Iroquois inhabited and practiced agriculture in a limited scale in parts of Scarborough and Pickering.

While Tabor Hill is located facing a quiet residential street, the main arteries that surround the cemetery are lined with high-rise apartment buildings that are home to many low-income individuals and families. Recently, I became interested in issues of urban food insecurity for the working poor, for people on social assistance as well as for populations of people in depressed, under-serviced urban neighbourhoods. Hunger and insufficient nutrition are realities for many people in Toronto. This problem is being addressed in part by the growing number of inspiring community gardens and urban horticultural initiatives in inner-city Toronto neighbourhoods such as Alexandria Park and Parkdale. Such initiatives bring to mind Iroquois practices of subsistence farming, within which the “three sisters”-- corn, beans, and squash-- were dietary staples.

My goal is to create a public artwork that combines my artistic interest in the culture of food with the horticultural practices and symbols of the Iroquois and the burgeoning urban horticulture movement. My proposal involves the placement of three bronze sculptures in a parkette on Greenbrae Circuit in Scarborough, across from a cluster of high and mid-rise apartment buildings. The sculptures would each be approximately 6-8’ tall and 15-20’ wide, and would structurally resemble both Iroquois longhouses and hoophouses, which are essentially greenhouses with a flexible material draped and tied over the frame. This “longhouse” shape seems like an appropriate structure to work with, given not only it’s structural relationship to the hoophouse, but also to the highrise apartment, which is meant to accommodate a number of people through the upward and outward stacking of living quarters.

Each of the Three Sisters sculptures would be cast with a different surface treatment, each one alluding to and resembling the “three sisters” of the Iroquois-- corn, beans and squash. Ideally, the sculptures will not only beautify the parkette, but will exist to house and shelter community gardens for the apartment buildings directly across the street.

The purpose of my project, Three Sisters, is two-fold-- the sculptures will not only serve as a monument to the history of aboriginal people in Scarborough, but they also serve as a new kind of monument-- one that quite literally serves and nurtures the community that they are currently situated in.