ArtClothText

City of Craft Toronto Installation Programming
Call for Proposals
Deadline: August 31, 2009

City of Craft is looking for crafty artists and artsy crafters to create installations for this year’s City of Craft 2009, which will take place both in and around The Theatre Centre during the weekend of December 12-13, 2009. This year’s installation programming will be greatly expanded to include more installation artists and even more fantastic Queen Street West venues. For this year’s installations we hope to include a wide range of crafty approaches, which reflect the diversity and conceptual richness of contemporary craft practices. Several venues will be available to artists for City of Craft installation programming this year, from Queen West galleries, storefront windows and public spaces to the nooks and crannies of City of Craft’s fabulous and historic venue, The Theatre Centre. Some ideas for proposals could include (but are certainly not limited to!) the exploration of:

- crafty public interventions


- ‘digital craft’ (craft + video, craft + kinetics, etc)


- crafty performance


- textile-based installations


- participatory craft-based installations

To propose an installation, go to our online installation application:

http://www.cityofcraft.com/2009/cityofcraft/installations/form.php

For more information, or questions regarding City of Craft installation programming or submissions, contact: cityofcraft@gmail.com

Good luck!

Signed,

The City of Craft Collective

Volume 5 Issue 2/ Spring/ summer 2009 is now on line, with the title Entrepreneurial Textiles this double issue looks at the Inspired Design: Jacquard and Entrepreneurial Textiles conference which took place in Hendersonville, North Carolina this past January. Using the conference as a base we offer profiles of eight Canadian designer makers working with industrial or hand techniques in printing weaving and knitting to produce yardage for garments, fashion accessories and home décor products.

The issue is completed with reviews and previews of exhibitions Textile Arts of Canada at the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles, Biennale Internationale du Lin de Portneuf 2009 in the Portneuf region in Quebec, and Thinking Different: Thinking JacquART in Haslach Austria which has been organized to coincide with the European Textile Networks 15^th annual conference.

www.velvethighway.com

submitted by Joe Lewis

Due to overwhelming public response, Honest Threads by acclaimed Toronto artist Iris Häussler has been extended to March 29, 2009. A panel discussion featuring David Moos, Shelley Hornstein and Martha Baillie takes place in Honest Ed’s on Thursday, March 5 at 6:30 PM

Set up as a small clothing collection inside Toronto’s famous landmark, the Honest Ed’s store, Honest Threads displays garments and the memories they carry. Lent by ordinary Torontonians as well as local celebrities, each item holds a personal story revealing a glimpse of the many threads that weave our identity over time. Visitors are able to borrow the garments for a few days and wear them, experiencing both literally and psychologically what it is like to
“walk in someone else’s shoes” and adding new layers to the clothes’ story. Spotlighting Honest Ed’s significance as a haven for newcomers to Canada, Honest Threads positions the store as the meeting point of individual Toronto stories of immigration, survival and childhood dreams, entwined with the city’s cultural history.

For more information on the project and Iris Häussler visit www.kofflerarts.org and www.haeussler.ca

See more stories on the Honest Threads BLOG… or send us your story and image of the clothing item you borrowed! Visit today at http://honestthreads.blogspot.com

Via Akimbo

PRIME presents tapestry, works on paper, and a newly released book on the life works of Tamara Jaworska. Jaworska’s skill as an artist-weaver belongs to the disciplines that were born more than five hundred years ago, while the pictorial essence of her tapestries is pure twentieth century-dynamic and original in design, splendid in colours and filled with new and surprising forms. The Polish and later Canadian nature and landscape has always played a very significant role in the character of her vision. Her most recent work “Free Verses”/” Vers Libre” revealed the artist at the height of her powers and indicated even more the remarkable range of her talents.

orange blue, 2008, oil on canvas, 46 x 36 cm

Sasha Pierce Commingle
Greener Pastures Contemporary Art
August 29 – September 27, 2008

Public Reception: Friday, August 29, from 7 – 10 PM

“Drawn to the inherent physicality of oil paint, Sasha Pierce weaves seemingly infinite variations of colour and pattern. In her application, done with a small plastic bag from which gradient lines of paint are squeezed from a tiny hole, Pierce covers the canvas with small meditative marks. Individual points coalesce into a fluid whole and light illuminates the texture. Pierce alludes to the body, the core, with the paintings’ vertical orientation and gentle curves. Within the rich texture are inconsistencies that convey a history, a character.”

To view more of Pierce’s fascinating work visit www.sashapierce.ca

Open Studio, 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104, Toronto ON
email: office@openstudio.on.ca
Gallery HoursTuesday through Saturday, 12-5pm

Janice Wu, Explanere (Unfolding the Complexities of Cloth), detail, paper photocopies, each horse 0.5′ x 0.25′ x 0.25′, overall installation 9′ x 16′ x 0.25′, 2006

Open Studio is pleased to present Explanere, a solo exhibition by Calgary-based artist Janice Wu from March 6 to 29, 2008. Explanere is a floor installation laid out as a structured sea of identical hand-folded small paper horses printed in variations of grey tones. The installation reads at once as a mass and as delicate individual structures at closer inspection. The artist meticulously folded, then photocopied, and then folded again each horse, making each copy from its neighbouring horse. The result is waves of shifting tones from dark to light, at times also the result of fading toner or the artist’s manipulation of the photocopier. The labour of folding, copying and laying each individual origami structure is as much about the work as the final installation. This handwork – also reminiscent of textile work – speaks to repetition, form, gesture and recorded memory. As exhibition essay writer Mackenzie Frère writes, “the accumulation of gesture in these folded paper horses, each bearing a record of its predecessor on its surface, comprise Janice Wu’s poetic explanation of the complexity of memory as a dualistic construction of lived experience and that which is recorded.”