It's about love

Art is about relationships even if it appears to be about nature.

Coastal Trip by Paterson Ewen (1925-2002)  acrylic and metallic paint on gouged plywood  1974

I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario last week.  

Paterson Ewen is one of my favourite artists.

Coastal Trip by Paterson Ewen  1974  (each part is about 60 inches)

I respond with my whole body to the rugged materials and strong marks in his unique paintings.

The scale of his work holds us.  

coastal trip detail by Paterson Ewen  acrylic on plywood cut with first with a router 1974

Monotones (Seascape) by Silke Otto-Knapp watercolour on canvas 2016

I took my 7 year old grand daughter with me.  

We only lasted about an hour.

Monotones (seascape) detail by Silke Otto Knapp  

It's hard work, 

looking and thinking

 and climbing all the curvy stairs.

When we got home we made collaborative drawings with ball point pens in my journal.    

highway 17 return home

Our visit with our son and his family was beautiful and I am so very grateful. 

 

Nadia Myre

This post is about Nadia Myre's exhibition Balancing Acts, now on at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto until mid-September.  Nadia Myre is of mixed Algonquin and French Canadian heritage.  In 2014 she won the Sobey award, Canada's $50,000 prize for artists under 40 years old.

Sharing Platform 2018  ceramic, various oxides, stainless stell thread  Nadia Myre

From a distance, the artwork in the above photo looks like an antique sweetgrass basket, but on closer examination the materials are like beads.  Maybe it was made by an indigionous woman from long ago, presented for us to admire in this respectful museum setting.  But the artist, Nadia Myre, has fooled us.  Although she is indigionous, the 'basket' is brand new, made in 2018, from ceramic copies of clay shards that the artist found on the banks of the Thames river in London, England.

When Europeans arrived in the New World in the 1600s, tobacco use became popular and clay tobacco pipes pre-stuffed with tobacco werer manufactured in London and Glasgow.    The pipe had a bowl and an elongated stem that was broken off in segments as the tobacco was smoked.  It is these shards and segments that were collected by the artist and her son.

The exhbition includes large-scale digital photographs such as the one above, entitled Code Switching: Pipe Beads (2017). 

Tobacco Barrel 2018  ceramic, oxides, stainless steel thread, Nadia Myre

Nadia Myre's deep respect or and committment to the act of making things by hand is evident as she explores the politics of identity and belonging through poetic, feminist backdrops of craft, care and resilience.  (wall text, textile museum of Canada)

In this body of work, she makes new objects and images that demonstrate how institutionalized archaelogical narratives can be easily destablized.   She also shows how museums simultaneously preserve and erase cultural context.

Besides the work with pipe beads, there are several large scale digital photos in the exhibition.  Above is Gathering Sky 2016, an image of a net superimposed over an atmospheric blue and white sky.  But sky is impossible to contain.   Click here for a pdf that will explain further about Nadia Myre's work.

Scarscapes 2  Time  seed beads and thread  Nadia Myre

Nadia Myre uses photographs, beadwork and textiles to represent human presence.

Between 2005 and 2013 Myre invited people to cut or tear and then mend their scars, both real and symbolic, on stretched canvas fabric and, as well, to write about these scars.  Over the 8 years, 1400 canvases and accompanying texts were created for this Scar Project.    As a follow up to that project, Myre made loom woven beadworks that isolated the most prevalent motifs: sorrow, love, healing and survival.  Scarscapes (2009) and Scarscapes 2 (2015) are in the current exhibition.

Scarscapes 2 2015  Mind  Loss  Time  Nadia Myre

human interaction
environmental change
cultural production

Meditation  (respite 01) 2017 digital print (above)  is a large scale photograph, the first thing the visitor sees upon entering the exhibition.  The size of the photo and the repetitive handwork depicted in it prepares the viewer for a contemplative experience in the rest of the exhibition.

I also want to mention a project not included in this exhibition, but that is an important work for Canada.  Between 1999 and 2002, Nadia Myre organized the Indian Act project, in which she enlisted over 230 friends, colleagues and strangers to help her bead over every word of the Indian Act.   Each English word was covered up with white beads, all negative spaces with red beads.  Very labour intensive, beautiful, and political, the beaded works call attention to that colonial legislation and  provide a step forward for social change.

Nadia Myre asks enduring questions around colonial legacies and I felt lucky to be able to view her new work.

earth and air

I've named this piece Earth and Air, and I've been thinking about why I did.
Initially, it came out of the Luce Irigaray quote I was inspired by for my exhibition entitled The Cloud In Me.
"How do I make earth out of air and protect the cloud in me?"

The earth figure is intuitively pieced from men’s wool suiting fabrics.  These were dyed with a variety of plants gathered from the ditches and fields of Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada where I live.  The figure was hand quilted by hand to a linen tablecloth with coloured threads, a little red.

Surrounding the figure are wide expanses of torn linen damask table linens.  These strips have been pieced together so that the horizontal seams are exposed.  The raw edges seem fragile, but in truth they are strong.   This sky area has also been hand quilted to the tablecloth backing, with white silk thread.

The dualities contained in the work are:  horizontal / vertical, wool / linen, colour / white, male / female, and Manitoulin Island’s Indigenous / European settler societies.

This artwork is about the affirmation of nature and the support of the huge sky above and around all of us humans in the world.  We all, at some time in our lives, stand alone and look out over horizons.  We are all given access to our own inner immensity by such standing and looking, and we all feel connected to the place where we stand.   Being quiet and alone in nature, we begin to understand how the earth has been here a very long time and we begin to believe that it will continue.  

the idea of thread

 I attended the International Art Fair in Toronto on its last day, October 26.  This post shares a few of the artworks I saw there that used thread or the idea of thread.

Above, Toni Hamel's drawing Flight of Fancy 2015.  (16 x 20 inches)

 The materials: graphite, watercolour on paper with thread.

 Art Toronto brings together galleries from around the world.

These container sculptures (above) and the tank in the image below were made by Jannick Deslauriers from organza, thread and beads.

 The gallery that showed this delicate work:  Art Mur from Montreal.

 Art Mur also brought new work by Nadia Myre to its booth at the convention centre.

Nadia Myre won the 2014 Sobey Art Award.  Her work is about healing and retaking control of the trauma caused by history.  These black and white digital prints show the threads on the backs of panels she made in 2000-2003.

The titles of these large prints (43 x 33 inches each) are from left to right Orison #3, Orison # 4 and Orison #7  all 2014.

The Orison panels are the backs of three of the 56 pages Myre and more than 200 collaborators worked on between 2000 and 2003.  Every letter in chapters 1-5 of the 1876 Indian Act of Canada was pierced by a needle and replaced with a bead.

Those black and white Orison prints show the 'hidden evidence of this act of subversion against a genocidal legacy of assimilation and colonialism, and also they are a poetic testament to the strength of connective threads that ultimately bind that resistance together."  Bryne McLaughlin, managing editor Canadian Art Magazine.

 One of the most luxurious uses of thread as an artist's medium is Ed Pien's Play 2012.

 The materials noted on the wall label state simply: 'rope',

Colour, texture, emotion and messiness are beautifully contained in this sculpture. Three of Pien's large ink drawings were mounted on the wall.  (glimpsed above)

 There is no thread in what appears to be an old fashioned one patch quilt by Mitch Mitchell,.

 It's digitally printed paper, folded and patched together with adhesive.  dc3 art projects gallery.

 My final selection of the many artworks that used thread or it's conceptual metaphor is this wall construction made from canvas that had been drawn on with ink, then cut up and sewn back together.

The artist is Jessica Bell from Ottawa.  The title of the piece is Folly, made in 2015.  It was part of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

Art Toronto was at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre October 23 - 26 2015.  It is an annual event, so plan to attend next year if you are in the area.

MAKING OTHERWISE / FOLK LORE AND OTHER PANICS

passion over reason  by Mark Clintberg and members of Winds and Waves guild , Fogo Island Newfoundland

I have chosen a quilt made with wrong side out fabrics to begin this post about Folk Lore and Other Panics, a 12-artist exhibition curated by Mireille Eagan that was up at The Rooms in St. John's Newfoundand until April 26 2015.

The quilt flips the text from Reason over Passion , the quilt that beloved Canadian artist Joyce Wieland made for prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau in 1968.  We learn from the wall label that artist Mark Clintberg designed this quilt because he is interested in women's intervention in politics and had ten similar quilts made by the Wind and Waves artisan group of Fogo Island Newfoundland.

Clintberg is one in a growing trend of young Canadian artists who are employing traditional craft, folk art, and commonplace materials to help us understand our panic-ridden contemporary world.

I like that the sixteen women's names from the Wind and Waves collective are listed on the wall label.  I like that the ten quilts in this edition are placed randomly on beds in the Fogo Island Inn.  I like that the story of the Wieland/Trudeau gift is held up for contemplation.  I like that artists as cool as Mark Clintberg are speaking the language of the quilt.

1970 stomped globe  by Kay Burns  2003 and ongoing

These interesting circular shapes are also from the Folk Lore and Other Panics exhibition.  The text on the wall label reveals that the artist, Kay Burns, impersonated Iris Taylor, the fictional founder of the Flat Earth Society and that these discs are the results of stomping on globes, an initiation act that new members do in order to express their common sense.

Like so much conceptual art, it helps to read about the intent of the artist, and then something goes bong in the mind and new insight (and laughing out loud) happens.

Two interesting and more comprehensive reviews of Folklore and other Panics are here and also here.

Road Trip  2012  by Janet Morton knitted wool man's outfit, video approximately  60 minutes

In Cambridge Ontario's Idea Exchange gallery, there is a second exhibition, Making Otherwise that features two videos about knitting.  In the first, Robert Kingsbury unravels an odd suit knitted by Janet Morton. Entitled Road Trip, the sixty minute video explores the dimension of time, and Morton connects ephemeral with repetitive, walking with thinking, and real time with embedded time for the viewer.

That suit took at least a month for Morton to knit but Kingsbury easily unravels it into a single ball in an hour as he walks through the outskirts of a town - past gas stations, alongside ditches, rhythmically lifting his legs to undo her labour,  not losing a step.  (Video was recorded by Nick Montgomery).

The second video, Shiny Heart, reminds us that while making things by hand is a slow and meditative quiet act for the maker, the result can be seen (and heard in this case) by others in mere minutes. Janet Morton's use of time based art forms such as music and video in combination with her slow textile production confounds us.  All the time that is spent making.  It's invisible.

 

The tuba that Colin Couch performs Bach's Goldberg variation #25 is muffled with knitted yarn over the 13 minutes that it takes to play it, beginning at the mouth piece and going around and around each and every tube large and small while he determinately makes his music.  It makes us think about all the time he spent learning and practicing the difficult piece.  It's invisible.

Janet Morton spent weeks covering the tuba with knitting, a complicated and fiddly thing to do and then in 13 minutes, it was undone.  The video of the undoing was shot by Morton's collaborator, Robert Kingsbury, and then played in reverse so that the instrument is magically covered up.  What is mind boggling is that the sound of the Bach variation is unaffected by the reverse video.  The hours spent by Andrew McPherson editing and fiddling with the video and sound looks effortless, but it's not.  It's invisible.
This Canadian Art review gives more information and a photo of the silent tuba.  Click  here.

The final artist I will mention is Sarah Maloney from Nova Scotia who uses embroidery and sculpture to address art history and women's  place in society.

A mother of three, the non toxic and portable art of embroidery allowed her to maintain her art practice (MFA Windsor) while raising the girls.   She also made the heavy oak frames for her large pieces herself as well as a fainting sofa with bronze tulips that is also part of the installation but not shown here.

The beauty of the curves and patterns are compelling.  There is intensity in this careful art.  The botanically correct and much enlarged couples of fertile tulips are bursting with life.

Making and otherwise: Craft and Material fluency in Contemporary Art includes six Canadian artists and was curated by Heather Anderson and organized by Carlton University Art Gallery.  It will be in Cambridge until June 27 2015.