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Horrifying rugs, Collectible rags inspire

10/25/2013

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I became acutely aware that craft can pack a serious political punch when I first saw a fleeting image of an Afghan rug designed with bombs, grenades and exploding figures, created by children.

It's a potent example of how craft can transcend its place from a use/decorative object to an art object, and was just one of many collected war rugs that formed a 2008-2009 exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada.

It is their inappropriateness, in conventional terms, that resonates. And even if the maker is never known, his (or more likely 'her') soul is woven into the piece. The expression is a response to the maker's environment, providing moments of discovery while posing new questions, like: What is the use of a rug as a comfort object if it's communicating discomfort?



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It's in the images, but also the laborious, repetitive process, and the materials themselves. 

It's why rags can become collectors' items, like this Japanese 'boro' (literally 'rag') futon cover that appears on a collectors' website (and at collector's price of $1850.US)

While there's no apparent narrative in this humble textile, it speaks of the time when it was made, in the form of a visual sample of the fabrics of the day. It's also a visual history of sashiko stitching, which evolved from a method of repairing and recycling fabrics to a highly symbolic craft. And it speaks of a sensibility toward thrift, whether out of simple necessity or attachment to the materials (probably both).

The transcendent ability of crafts is seen in how simple stitchery evolves, from patching a jacket to emblematic artworks.

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This sashiko tool bag, shown in the first major sashiko exhibit in the UK, has long transcended its original use but remains a use object in an art context, complete with stitches representing hemp and pine bark, emphasized by a persimmon flower patterned border.

Those patterns may reflect the actual rural culture or physical surroundings, or a nostalgic yearning of place by the maker. 



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These days my dreams are awash in faded, ragged indigo — it must be all the eerie, enduring fog — and lacy white construction cranes. For reasons beyond my left brain, I've been trying to figure out how to capture the forest of pivoting white cranes as I weave through these large-scale spaces of work  on my way on to my own work. 

Cranes are part of my place that during my life is enduring massive change as my place transforms from industrial port town to glittering international resort city.


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Somewhere in this pile of rags and stitches, towers and cranes is a space for expressing my place and time. I'm turning paintings into rags, photos into stitches and back again, trying to tie in the loose ends, working my way through the discomfort and the need for comfort.

Where is it all going? I wonder that every day as I dodge the bike route closures and count the clusters of looming cranes pivoting overhead in an aerial Developers' Dance.

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when dress-up becomes an artform

10/18/2013

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Thank god for The Walking Dead. It is the one force that has the power to kill off the overpopulation of pink princesses.

All that Pepto-Bismol-hued froth and glitter kicks in my gag reflex but I'm no censor; I've indulged in the princess fantasy of those little girls (and, shockingly, some grown women) for too many years to mention. But there is hope. Pink fatigue appears to have set in this year, at least for Halloween, due, no doubt, to the craze for the undead.

Next battle: the pink aisle.

Princesses and stupid Sexy costumes (popular YouTube clip at the end of this rant) are a waste of a great fantasy opportunity — and an art opportunity.

American photographer Cindy Sherman's long and rich career dedicated to using her body as a blank canvas on which to apply various female personas, makes her an artist of an ever-changing body-sculpture, earning her an important position in conceptual art, performance art, and gender studies.

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There's a lot of concept to be mined when altering one's appearance, whether for art or undercover information. Former New York Times restaurant reviewer Ruth Reichl, who donned disguises to ensure she would be treated as a regular restaurant patron, discovered that her different range of personas garnered different reaction from the wait staff. That body effect became equally as interesting as her reviews, and even more so to many of her readers.

Buenos Aires photographer Irena Werning explores the persona of the past, recreating photos of subjects using their own childhood images. She not only recreates the pose and garments, but goes to great lengths to mimic the backdrops and particular photo quality of the original image. Werning insists she has no arching concept in mind in her two-part series, but the effect is there in black and white or colour: a riveting time-based visual study in changes in body and persona.

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Above: Christoph 1990 and 2011, Berlin Wall.

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A potent show of Fabric unfolds at the Vancouver Art Gallery

10/11/2013

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PictureKimsooja with curator Daina Augaitis
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. 

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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. 


PictureThe mix of rusty, worn mechanical objects and brilliant satin fabrics is a visual feast.
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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Power of art is as plain as Putin's drag face

10/4/2013

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Whenever I'm hit with another CBC countdown promo of its exclusive Canadian coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi that viral image of Putin in drag makeup pops into my head.

That one cheeky act packs a political wallop and reminds me that while the pen is mightier than the sword, there's the same power in the paintbrush. And Photoshop.

That image (which I'm still searching for in the form of a legal-fundraising T-shirt) has me dreaming of an Olympics that has athletes wearing rainbow scarves on the podium. More likely it will be the very real nightmare of the military dragging away brave individuals in the stands and the streets who are demanding justice in the face of a homophobic president and its national political policy of hate.

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A taste of things to come was most recently seen when Russian artist Konstantin Altunin fled to Paris to seek asylum after his painting of Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in lingerie was seized along with three other paintings in his August show. The crime is unclear. It may be promoting homosexuality to minors. Or hooliganism, which sounds funny but landed the members of Pussy Riot with two years' hard time for performing a  "punk prayer" in Moscow's main Orthodox cathedral last year after Putin was reinstated as president.

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So 'performance', even if it's a sloppy dance in homemade hoods, is mightier than the sword. The heavy hand of Putin's policies may be winning the battle — Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova ended her nine-day hunger strike last week to protest working conditions in the women's prison, to no avail, apparently — but the war for social justice is just beginning.

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It's unclear whether these unlikely political terrorists (the three convicted seen here pose with their verdict) see it that way.

Taking on the U.S. President or his policies through art has none of that threat of individual freedom of expression.  True, there may be a sort of White House Down going on there at the moment, in the form of a government shutdown over a glacial move toward universal health care, but you don't go to jail for performing or painting or Photoshopping your president in a political artwork. 

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You can march on Washington, carrying your homemade sign depicting your president's head on a Pez dispenser spouting one Lie after another, or you can even tattoo his face on the sole of your foot so you can stomp on his image with every step (below) but you can't mess with individuals. And in these parts that includes private companies, as we learned in viewing The Corporation (written by Vancouver's own Joel Bakan, UBC law professor).

You want a taste of the kind of trouble you can bring upon yourself via the paintbrush or Photoshop or performance, take on some of those individual-companies. You might not land in the gulag but you may find yourself paying through the pocketbook in legal defence fees for violating their 'individual' rights.

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    Cross-posted at
    carlynyandle.substack.com

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