"What's up with the doilies?"
(Video courtesy of Terry Fox Theatre's PechaKucha program. More info on the entertaining, informative and globally-popular PechaKucha format here.)
This just uploaded... Six and a half minutes devoted to that question I get a lot:
"What's up with the doilies?" (Video courtesy of Terry Fox Theatre's PechaKucha program. More info on the entertaining, informative and globally-popular PechaKucha format here.) Maybe it's the chilly monochromatic climate at work here, but I'm suddenly wrapping myself up granny squares. The more I think about them, the more potential I see. There's a lot of culture woven into those fuzzy little colour grids. They're there in the background of popular culture, infusing irony and cozy home-yness, nostalgia and disdain. One graces the couches of neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler's nerdy apartment and Roseanne's working-class house. Jemaine sleeps under one (badly). Sure, they achieve that soupçon of shabbiness or tastelessness essential to the story but those set decorators are no idiots; granny squares inject hits of high colour and pattern to the visual field. They are trippy, decorative non-decor objects. Their form is used because of their assumed function over form. They are the throws that are thrown around, their colourful geometry reflected and refracted so that they radiate western domestic culture, love it or hate it. Cate Blanchett adorned a designer version on the red carpet, to a chorus of derision by the fashion police, which secured the actress more publicity. There's something delicious in the mix between haute couture and the easy, scrappy crochet method that results in over 13,000 Etsy items under the search term, "granny squares". I've loved/hated granny squares ever since my cousin and I were given matching shrink vests at age 10, from our moms. I would have been wearing that single, large purple granny square at a time when the Italian dads in the neighbourhood were setting up that granny-square pattern in concrete breeze walls around their brand new Vancouver Specials. Like the blankets, the breeze walls evoke utility and thrift but are visually interesting enough to warrant new consideration. The modularity of granny squares and breeze-wall blocks ooze with potential, especially as a mash-up. Granny squares command attention. The Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum took on new dimensions when it was covered in thousands of donated granny squares as part of its CAFAM Granny Squared installation a couple of years ago. Suddenly, a city that is generally at odds with notions of the handmade, the domestic and the artisanal was attracting mainstream media attention for its collaborative crocheted culture jam. A couple of years before that, in 2011, members of many Finnish women's organizations and the craft teachers' union blanketed Helsinki Cathedral's steps in 3,800 granny square tilkkupeitosta (Finnish for 'quilt'). The modular motif marries beautifully to existing architecture, as the granny squares take on a Tetris effect, cascading down to the giant public square in this domestic intervention. But what about the granny square as a building block itself? What if a building appeared to rise out of a giant crocheted coverlet? How could concretized crocheted granny squares be utilized as sculpture? It's a fuzzy concept worth building on. It's getting close to a decade since I packed it all in: my needles and wool, my sewing machine and fabrics, my mid-level-management career. There was more to explore. I've been mixing it up with a wide range of materials (and makers) ever since but even I'm surprised to find that my latest tools of choice for bushwacking new routes of making are the ol' crochet hooks, knitting needles, rug hooks and embroidery needles. The line on the paper has always been too limiting to me; I need to pick up that line, play with it in my hands, turn it into area, then volume. I remain entranced by the possibilities of connecting something created by a silkworm or an industrial manufacturing plant to a mathematical model or a wearable with uncomfortable connotations. The beauty of fiber is in its physical and metaphorical ability to connect the Art side to the Design side (not to mention the science side), weaving the two together until it's clear that playing with ideas cannot be put into separate boxes. Except if we're talking shipping boxes, for the Toronto Design Offsite (TO DO) Festival next month. A few object-experiments from my ongoing Fuzzy Logic series will be packed in there, as part of the Vancouver group of makers, selected by the Dear Human creative studio. It's all part of the ‘Outside the Box’ exhibits featuring works from three selected Canadian cities — Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver — and five from the U.S.: New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle. It's a fine way to mine local design ideas and visions through an unexpected selection of objects that are shared in various locations via specific-sized shipping boxes. The Vancouver contribution includes nine individuals and teams who live, design and make in the greater Vancouver area. The connecting thread is a pursuit of a design practice through material exploration, according to Dear Human. "Whether through common applications of unusual materials or transcending common materials through unusual applications, exploration is evident in each of the included objects." Rounding out the Vancouver Outside the Box contingent are: Cathy Terepocki, Dahlhaus, Dina Gonzalez Mascaro, Hinterland Designs, Laura McKibbon, Rachael Ashe, and Studio Bup. Vancouver Outside the Box will take over the windows at 1082 Queen Street West, Toronto, from January 19-25, 2015. TO DO is an annual city-wide not-for-profit week-long festival that celebrates and showcases the nation's design scene, providing exposure and cross-pollination of ideas and techniques. There are too many exhibits, installations, talks, parties and films to list here, so check out the full (and growing) schedule here as well as the fun promo video. A big shout-out to the recycling staffer at my local Return-It depot who painstakingly went through a bin full of snarls of computer cables to select the ones with the most colourful clusters of wire for me. I find it tough to march right into these kind of dirty, noisy man places but a girl's gotta do what she needs to do for her art. And I needed some cables to macrame for an upcoming show. I'm in love with cable wire because it almost vibrates with the culture of our times and can be used in place of and in reference to traditional fibers. It's in overabundance (wireless home - hah!) and really pretty. But to get it you've got to do some shucking. And this is how I came to spend many of these past fine days decapitating each, uh, connector-plug thing, skinning the plastic conduit with an X-acto knife, pulling away insulating woven aluminum or cellophane wraps and bundling the colourful clusters into skeins. (Below: before and after.) I can't resist mixing traditional fiber arts with industrial materials as a starting point and letting the materials kind of take over, shaping concepts. Sure, you could make a few bracelets or wrap a few light fixtures with the stuff but the power of the mountains of those wires, cables, old plastic laptops and toxic dead rechargeable batteries resonates with issues of globalization, environmental hazard, over-work and over-connectedness. Yum! No surprise that there is an emerging — no, burgeoning — genre of sculptural and installation work that uses tossed computer bits to evoke those themes. Below left, Democratic Republic of Congo artist Maurice Mbikayi's "Anti-social Network I" is one in a series of works that attempts to grapple with his "digital demons." Below right, it took Polish sculptor Marek Tomasik three years to install an enclosure composed of old computer parts in a 14th Century castle in Poland. Sarah Gee Miller says she's pretty handy. That's the understatement of the evening. Her paper 'paintings' are not only visually stunning and conceptually rich but they resonate with the dedication of a serious craftsman. Funny how the word 'crafts' only gets the serious respect it deserves when the 'man' is attached to it. Suddenly the mind moves from, say, knitting or embroidering to, say, boat-building or blacksmithing. Here at the Voices from Another Room show at the Hot Art Wet City gallery, the craftsmanship is here in the medium of paper. It's that juxtaposition between the humble, ephemeral material and the heavy-duty skill and commitment of craftsmanship that makes this show of five artists' work so compelling. The results of that individual devotional patience, determination, repetition is on view. And I can attest that there's also frustration, physical exertion, second-guessing and the flops. You don't get to this calibre of work without enduring a few hard battles. The conceptual elements of the pieces in this group show may reference particular art genres (or not) but the methods are perhaps unconsciously rooted in this region that is built on a New World culture of self-sufficiency, innovation and handwork, in a medium fitting for this corner of the world that was built in large part on the pulp and paper industry. Location, whether in art or real estate, is everything. The beauty of the group show that has that one connecting thread — or in this case, wood fibre — is in how far that thread can be stretched, from Miller's totemic paintings to Sabo's heavy net-like installations of twisted newspaper, to Ashe's filigree screens, to Alison Woodward's three-dimensional twisted fairytale vignettes and Joseph Wu's origami sculptures. But beyond the medium there's the other connecting thread of craftsmanship, which Wu articulates as both a scientific and artistic exploration. This is a show of skill that is developed through the often meditative repetitive act of carving or twisting or folding, but the art is in the repetition of those expanding skills. It is how Sabo's net works have led her to ideas about laminating newspaper blocks, or how Miller's paper paintings grew out of her own drawing machine. "The open relation between problem solving and problem finding... builds and expands skills," according to author Richard Sennett in The Craftsman. "But this can't be a one-off event. Skill opens up in this way only because the rhythm of solving and opening up occurs again and again." Voices from Another Room: 5 Artists Explore Paper continues to April 25, Wed-Sat noon to 5 p.m. at 2206 Main (at 6th Ave.), Vancouver. After three months of sewing one donated button after another into a giant QR code, the big moment arrived this week: time to stand back and scan that baby with a reader app, translating this quilt-thing to read, "The devil is in the details." Except it didn't read. Don't panic!, I thought, then spent the entire next day working with a photo image of the QR Button Blanket, Photoshopping in more buttons and darker buttons and bigger buttons, trying to add the minimum amount of density for the software program to register the pattern and work its magic to produce the punchline. No luck; even a sliver of white in one button cluster puts a wrench in the wholecloth works. I filed this one under the category of Epic Fail, not worth finishing it as intended, framing it in black bias binding. I do not want to create something that is 'still' good; I want the thing to be good, full stop. Failure demands confronting the why. Why conceive such a laborious, risky project in the first place? Why endure the painstaking process when half-way through it was becoming abundantly clear that this was not going to 'read'? But there is another power here, and that's tied to the process beyond the product. The achievement may lie in the endurance (in an increasingly A.D.D. world) that is not necessarily attached to the product after all. It may be in seeing it through, without the promise of a sure result. The power may lie in the humble, everyday materials and the community of women who contributed all those bits of plastic saved from the waste stream. (There should really be a global ban on production of billions of plastic buttons. Plant-based plastic, bone, wood, and leather- or fabric-wrapped tin buttons eventually return to the earth.) But what's really starting to click in for me is the cultural reference of this button-grid design. A decade ago, it might have been viewed as an oddly arranged colour field or an abstracted grid but we're so acclimatized to codes that the pattern begs to be 'read.' The fact that this is irresolvable might be annoying. And that's interesting. The possible multiple references could be more engaging than the one answer provided by a QR reader app. There's something to be learned in the discomfort of the open-endedness. Moments like these, I seek out the artists who have embraced what New York artist Polly Apfelbaum calls the 'tough beauty' of visually exciting works that incorporate everyday materials in surprising ways. Apfelbaum, who calls herself a bad crafter, articulates the process of hard work in this video. "I work all the time," she says, without a schedule and in a highly experimental way. "You make the work and then you hope for the best." "It's very important to get your fuck-you back." I'm going with that. This is clearly not a staged photo. Pretty much every rule of home decor is ignored here in this old East Van house. And that's why I love it. Maybe it's the weather but I've just about had enough of the grey-washed matte-bland interiors that we are supposed to love to live in. Where is the love in all those glassy surfaces and matchy-matchy square furniture? Various people and their various pets and their various collections have lived in this place for a century. The walls (and doors and kitchen cupboards and floors) do talk. They speak of the current long-time owner's love of old things, and his appreciation of the presumably impulsive work of his artist friend who painted the large Winnipeg Jets logo right smack dab in the middle of the original fir wood floor in the kitchen. It's a home with an open-door policy. Drop by anytime. If it's late Sunday afternoon, you might be absorbed into dinner arrangements, which are kept loose; you never know who's going to show up. There are a lot of stories. This door off the kitchen says something about the painter who did it (not to anyone's plans or specifications) and the owner-friend who digs it (and the painter). To anyone else it can be enjoyed as an example of painting itself. It can take the viewer to Frank Stella and the school of minimalism that relied on the physical limits of spaces to define the abstracted field; in this case, the inset panelling on the original door to the basement. Its dynamically asymmetrical pattern also speaks to quilting and other fiber arts. It's all part of a time-based dwelling-sculpture that is growing in layers over the decades, a living gallery of collaborative mark-making by those who have contributed to the social activity therein. The only thing that's inappropriate at this old house is the kind of fetishistic order as seen in virtual tours of display suites in a city seized by its speculative real-estate boom. Those investment-unit surfaces have nothing to say besides 'new' and 'generic.' This place gives new meaning to 'open house.' I'm posting this picture because if I don't do it now I might cram this doomed project into a green garbage bag and stuff it where the sun don't shine: in deep storage. I've seen through some fraught, laborious projects in my time but I may have met my match. After months of hoarding buttons and hounding others to surrender their button jars "for art's sake" I'm thisclose to admitting this thing is a colossal waste of time. The plan was to create a companion piece to my QR Quilt: After Douglas Coupland, a scrappy quilt translation of the artist's QR Code Paintings. This new one will be a 'whole-cloth' quilt, where only the buttons would bind the layers. And of course it will be readable with a QR code reader app. Trouble is, since I designed this coded button blanket last year I'm starting to think that QR codes are a fleeting technology, like the fax machine. The geeky chatter on the interwebs also tells me so . So, in a few years when the industrial marketing complex has made the stampede over to some other state-of-the-art attention-grabbing software schtick, the whole point of this project will be rendered obsolete. How did I not see the futility of trying to grapple with fleeting technology through a painstakingly slow craft method? The inner negator has been bullying me throughout week one of sewing one found button after another onto my marked grid. It's not helpful realizing that in the unlikely event that I have selected the correct colours to read black, and have sewn in enough button-density to create a readable pattern, I'm still left with an unwashable, lead-apron-heavy quilt. I can't even dedicate it as a shroud in my final wish for a sustainable green burial, as my corpse would be cocooned in all that non-biodegradable plastic poundage. This is normally the time when I call for reinforcements in the form of artist friends, who will invoke the usual mantra: 'Trust the process, trust the process.' I get it and I'm going with it. See it through. One button at a time, one day at a time. The week-one picture is posted. There's no pretending it's all still just a concept. This matter of time, technology and endurance matters. They say if you want someone's attention, whisper. Or maybe that was just a line from a Whisper pantyhose commercial back in the '70s. Whispering to get attention isn't easy in an image-packed urban landscape where slick marketing messages infiltrate our entire field of vision, from pop-up ads on our screens to the clutter of billboards. There's so much of it that we subconsciously absorb, dismiss then ignore each image as we move through the visual bombardment. And we wonder why we're mentally exhausted at the end of the day. That's what makes the experience of public artwork in the city landscape so compelling. No call to buy or to back a product or political organization or private enterprise. With no aspirational words (Believe! Passion! Simplify!) or branded images, logos, phrases or text of any kind to cue our automatic-piloted brain to overlook the visual image, a slight confusion sets in. Whoa. What the hell is that? First comes the double-take, then out comes the smart-phone camera. The proof of the attention-grabbing power of commercial-free artwork on the city environment can be measured by the number of similar google images. You'd be hard pressed to find that Telus panda ad on a Flicker photo stream, but you'll run across multiple images of a single public artwork, like this giant macrame-esque installation created by Jasminka Miletic-Prelovac, at the only tall building (for now) at Main and Broadway. Or Edward Burtynsky's images on Pattison billboards (spotted along West 4th Avenue, below). These message-free images that appropriate buildings and billboards are enough to compel viewers to investigate further. Turns out Miletic-Prelovac's work was this year's commission to highlight the livable laneways movement. And Burtynsky's images are from his latest book and new documentary, Watermark. No logos. No brands. No text. These are whispers that can create a small roar. Internationally renowned artist Kimsooja was verklempt at the opening reception for her show, Unfolding, at the Vancouver Art Gallery Thursday. Her audience would soon feel that emotion unfolding as the soft-spoken artist led a tour of the new exhibit that runs to Jan. 26. Revisiting some 30 years of her deeply personal works, with her son and other close family and friends in attendance, was clearly overwhelming for the Korean-born New York artist , who recently wrapped up another wrapping at the Venice Biennale. 'Overwhelming' is a good descriptor for the show, too. Bright, satiny boulder-like mounds presented in the Bottari tradition of wrapping gifts in colourful fabrics contain material scraps the artist retrieved from the Tsunami-struck region of Japan. Visitors feel the unfolding of a singular vulnerability in a cavernous room as simultaneous video screenings reveal the artist standing still in a crowded street in various urban corners of the Earth. Another room featuring truck overloaded with a heap of colours evokes displacement or an unwieldy migration. This retrospective is a reminder of the potency of found fabric, a culturally embedded material that can be a medium for painting or sculpture, often at the same time, as Kimsooja does so powerfully. The artist raises those stakes by making material a metaphor for the wrapping and unwrapping, the enfolding, the unfolding, the concealing and exposing that resonates long after leaving the gallery. A performance of Kimsooja's A Beggar Woman (see video clip, below) is set for Nov. 29 as part of Fuse. |
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