F`d Up! - Art Gallery of Mississauga

The AGM is Fibre’d Up as contemporary
directions in fibre-based art create a
radical vocabulary around material
invention and sculptural ambitions.
F’d Up! aims to explore the tension
between these new directions that
redefine the concept of “fibre art”
based on examples of significant artists
working in North America today.
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contents
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Stuart Keeler
F’D UP!
4
Kirsty Robertson
ARTISTS
Franco Arcieri, Claire Ashley,
Amanda Browder, Lyn Carter,
Kai Chan, Michelle Forsyth,
Noelle Hamlyn & Colleen Snell,
Hazel Meyer, Ed Pien,
Judith Tinkl and Anne Wilson.
This exhibition includes periodic
and durational performances
by Catalina Gonzalez, Sandra
Poczobut and Johannes Zits.
CURATED BY STUART KEELER
Art Gallery of Mississauga
F’ing Up Contemporary Art
6
Kendra Ainsworth
Assembly/Abstraction
10
works
38
Artist Profiles
Engage.
Think.
Inspire.
F’D UP!
This phrase opens the dialogue
at the AGM. The Gallery connects
with the people of Mississauga
through the collection and
presentation of relevant works
from a range of periods and
movements in Canadian art.
Expressing multiple ideas
and concepts, this visual art
translates into meaningful
cultural and social experiences
for all audiences. The AGM
employs innovative education,
artist projects and other
forms of dialogue to advance
critical enquiry and community
connection to the visual arts.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any
form without prior written permission from the
Art Gallery of Misisssauga.
Copyright ©2013
by the Art Gallery of Mississauga
All rights reserved.
Art Gallery of Mississauga
300 City Centre Drive, Mississauga, Ontario L5B 3C1
artgalleryofmississauga.com
Curator: Stuart Keeler
Graphic Design: Zinzan Studio
Project Coordinator: Jaclyn Qua-Hiansen
Unless otherwise stated, photography by Janick Laurent.
Catalogue of an exhibition held at
Art Gallery of Mississauga,
September 26 – November 9, 2013
Library and Archives Canada
Cataloguing in Publication
Essays by: Stuart Keeler, Kirsty Robertson,
Kendra Ainsworth
ISBN: 978-1-927595-04-6
1. Contemporary Canadian Art
2. Fibre Art
3. Sculpture
I. Keeler, Stuart – II. Robertson, Kirsty –
III. Ainsworth, Kendra – IV. Art Gallery of Mississauga.
300 City Centre Drive, Mississauga, Ontario L5B 3C1
artgalleryofmississauga.com
Stuart Keeler Essay
F’D UP!
STUART KEELER
2
F’d Up! brings together significant works by 15 artists currently
in the realm of contemporary
material explorations who employ the skills and techniques
of traditional craft or fibre. The
debate of Fibre vs. Craft or Craft
vs. Art is not the topic of interest.
Rather, the work in this exhibition
focuses upon fibre as a material
study to convey conceptual rigour
from the haptic to the hypnotic.
What is “F’d up” is that an artist
who works with thread, string,
yarn or fabric is often equated
with the backroom politics of
the moniker “women’s work,” a
gender-based derogatory term
that precludes the possibility of
male artists working with fibre. In
line with that is the questionable
assumption that fibre is a lesser
sculptural medium for exploration or content in the realm of
art. There is nothing wrong with
“women’s work;” however the
term excludes from the conversation important subjects being explored in the field of fibre-based
work, such as notions of masculinity, identity, diaspora and global
politics in addition to the queer
crafting movement.
In the late 1960s, the term “anti-form” meant the “disintegration” of traditional sculpture
and art concepts, opening a new
dialogue of aesthetic practices
based on form. The exhibition F’d
Up! aims to explore the tension
between these new directions that
redefine the concept of “fibre art”
from examples of North American
artists working today. Based upon
experimentation, these contemporary works differentiate the
protagonists from decades before,
thereby illustrating how a new
vocabulary is created as the result
of a formative radical gesture.
Harald Szeemann’s landmark exhibition, When Attitudes Become
Form, continues to inform sculptural form and gesture; however
when fibre, digital or craft technology and intuition are applied,
the equation becomes “F’d Up! ”
F’d Up! aims to evolve the discussion of artists’ conceptual intent
alongside technique while simultaneously explore the slippage
which begin to question materiality, both at the time a work of
art was made, and subsequently
as it ages and deteriorates. The
exhibition expands upon the conversation between sculptural ambition and the multiple forms of
fibre. The spirit of “anti-form” is
present — forms that fall, drape,
hang, tug and pull, and thereby
alter our perception of the ground
plane. In contrast to the traditional vein of sculpture and in line
Stuart Keeler is the Director | Curator of
the Art Gallery of Mississauga, as well as
a writer and critic with broad international
experience in curating, programming,
writing about and commissioning contemporary artists, public art and socially based
performance in the urban realm. Stuart’s
research interests include contemporary
art and its critical context and relation to
communities; embodiment, diaspora issues
and performativity; socially based art
actions in gallery and community contexts
with traditional use of fibre as
material, objects are experienced
rather than gazed upon. The
image of a material investigation
lingers within the vocabulary of
fibre with abject use of colour,
textural considerations and an intuitive sense in the work. We are
reminded that artists make the
rules, and that history will follow
their vision – where labels and
tropes of the past are allowed, if
we let them – to see and experience a post-world that is indeed
“F’d Up! ” in the best way. ●
as well as cultural and artistic forms of
sculptural practices and thinking. His previous roles include Curator and Director of
Programmes, the AGM, Mississauga (2010
– 2012), Founding Director of Le Flash,
Atlanta, GA (2007 – 2010), Artistic Director,
Art 44|46 , Chicago in addition has founded
and directed numerous artist projects
and curatorial affiliations associated with
festivals, museums, and contemporary art
spaces in North America and the EU. Keeler
has held several Professorships at School
at the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia
College (Chicago) as well as currently
teaches in the Sculpture Department at
the Ontario College of Art and Design
(Toronto). He has a BA in Art History from
the University of London (UK), an MFA from
The School at The Art institute of Chicago
and is currently working on a Ph.D with an
emphasis on Community Engagement and
the Role of the Artist.
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Kirsty Roberton Essay
F’ing Up
Contemporary
Art: Fiber in the
Gallery
Kirsty Robertson
4
So many stereotypes circulate
around textile-based art, ranging
from the pervasively repeated idea
that such art works do not belong
in the gallery to gendered ideas
that such art forms are pastime,
hobby or, at the very least, the poor
cousins of “real” art. A mis-interpretation for certain (after all, the
canvas base of the world’s painted
masterpieces hints at the secret
textile history of most gallery and
museum collections), the recent
prevalence of works using textiles
at all levels of the art world suggests a large number of contemporary artists working against
stereotype. Perhaps it should not
be surprising then, that as textiles
find their way out of the shadows
and into the front rooms of galleries and museums, they do so with
an explosive, colourful, force.
F’d Up! is a case in point. An
exhibition dedicated to subverting the typical displays of textile
art, F’d Up! features artists who
draw on traditional techniques,
and well-honed skills necessary
in fibre work, but who use textiles
for conceptually rigorous projects,
highlighting queer and post-gender approaches, using new and old
materials, and exploring questions
of identity, globalization, embodiment, community and being. What
results is a raucous cacophony of
colour, an overwhelming, in your
face expression of vibrant twenty-first century life told through
textiles. Stitched, stuffed and
glued, knitted, knotted, pinned and
printed, piled and hung, the works
in this exhibition refuse any typifying notion of what textile art should
be, instead filling the space, billowing and folding out through the
Art Gallery of Mississauga.
The delicate handling of thread
in Kai Chan’s Mirage, where silk
threads hang from nails in the
wall, swaying slowly in the breeze
created by passersby, the light
shining off the spider-web-like
knots in Ed Pien’s Corridor, Lyn
Carter’s graceful manipulation
of silk-like fabric over a metal
frame in Bouquet, or Anne Wil-
son’s animated threads moving in
stop-motion animation across the
screen, contrasts with the heaviness of Franco Arcieri’s Astral
Noise Costume, the weighted,
giant stitches pushing the heavy
garment/sculpture into the gallery floor. Traces of community
participation are found in Amanda
Browder’s Future Phenomena and
Cascading Mississauga, the cascading fabrics showing a moment
in time or what she calls a memory cloth made from fabric owned
by Brooklyn residents, and sewn
together in a map of a particular
space and time. Meantime, the
sound of the fan in Claire Ashley’s
spray painted PVC covered canvas sculpture reminds us that the
three-dimensionality of another
tasteless hunk is ephemeral. As
soon as the fan is turned off, the
sculpture will deflate, fold, and
return to its flexible fabric roots.
Michelle Forsyth’s paintings and
scraps from her husband’s shirts
show the mysterious transformation of mass-produced items
of clothing into individual objects,
replete with the memories of their
Kirsty Robertson is an Associate
Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum
Studies at Western University, Canada. Her
research focuses on activism, visual culture,
and changing economies. She has published
widely on the topic and is currently
finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: New
relationship together. Looking like
a series of t-shirt tails pinned to
the wall, Hazel Meyer’s ding-dong
Wall (…s to the Ball) adds texture and form to the white gallery
walls, while the space itself is
occupied through a series of performances: Catalina Gonzalez’s
knobbled, over-stuffed body-suit
exploring the boundaries of the
female body, Frog in Hand bringing a circus-like atmosphere to
the gallery, while Johannes Zits
and Sandra Poczobut play out the
opposite, using textiles to bind,
contain and physically connect
bodies to the gallery walls.
At the meeting point of sculpture and textiles, the works in F’d
Up! actively involve the viewer.
Fabric is stretched, both physically and metaphorically, such
that the works in the exhibition
quite literally move off the gallery
walls, block viewers’ movement
through the rooms, and demand
recognition. What is F’d up here
are expectations, of textile-art,
of sculpture, and of the coming
together of the two. ●
Economies of Protest, Vision, and Culture
in Canada. More recently, she has turned
her attention to the study of wearable
technologies, immersive environments, and
the potential overlap(s) between textiles and
technologies. She considers these issues
within the framework of globalization, activ-
ism, and creative economies. Her co-edited
volume, Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada, was released
in 2011, and her tri-authored volume Putting
IP in its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity
and the Everyday will be released by Oxford
University Press in January 2014.
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Kendra Ainsworth Essay
Assembly/
Abstraction:
Michelle Forsyth’s
Kevin’s Shirts
Kendra Ainsworth
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Amidst the many large, arresting installation pieces in the Art
Gallery of Mississauga’s recent
exhibition F’d Up!, Michelle Forsyth’s works might seem dwarfed
or unobtrusive. But the significance of her art in the context of
this exhibition goes far beyond
the relative small scale of the
works themselves. Taken from a
larger series recently exhibited
at Auxiliary Projects in Brooklyn,
Forsyth’s Kevin’s Shirts makes
poignant, if potentially conflicting
statements on both our global
and personal realities; the work
offers a commentary on how as a
society we are increasingly out of
touch with our physical surroundings, and yet speaks to how we
interact, on a very intimate level,
with the people and objects we
encounter in our day to day lives.
Much of the academic and theoretical content of F’d Up! turned
an eye on the nature and history
of fibre-based art and the connotations associated with the
medium. Not only must artists
and critics alike contend with the
tendency toward categorical distinction between art and “craft,”
with fibre-based practice being
consigned to the latter group, but
more specifically, they must also
grapple with the commonly held,
if simplistic and potentially apocryphal association of work with
fibre and textiles as historically
“women’s” work. Here, Forsyth’s
work creates an interesting
starting point for discussion.
Kevin’s Shirts consists of four 10”
by 10” paintings which render
the plaid patterns of Forsyth’s
husband’s shirts in gouache
on paper. The paintings are
accompanied by several weavings, haphazardly strewn on the
gallery floor, which once again
transpose Kevin’s Shirts from
their almost abstracted form
in painting, back into textile. A
cursory reading of the textile
components of Forsyth’s work
may lead the viewer to thoughts
of female labour, either through
the historical context of hand
or industrial weaving; or more
contemporary associations with
the traditionally female domestic
labour of laundry - the weavings
call to mind a disorderly bedroom
floor - but the artist counters this
notion. In conversation with the
author, Forsyth intimated that
her husband was always the one
to do the laundry in their household. And not only has she never
viewed weaving or textile work as
“women’s work,” here the textiles
serve as an emblem of both how
arbitrary these gendered associations are – heaps of cloth on
the ground speak to the absence
of Kevin and his domestic efforts
– and of the intrinsically personal quality that objects take on in
our lives. For Forsyth, the fibre
elements in her work are more
about intimacy than gender.
Starting this particular series
while her husband was away on
sabbatical, Forsyth was looking
to document, capture and remember her husband through
the tangible traces he left in
their living space – his clothing, a uniform of plaid shirts.
She began painting, taking the
mass-produced textile patterns
and at once bringing them into
the abstract, and at the same
time reconnecting them with the
artist’s or maker’s hand.
Glenn Adamson asserts in The
Invention of Craft that craft is
something that was created
alongside industry as its other,
rather than something industry arose out of or advanced
from. Forsyth produces a form
of “craft” that not only acts as a
foil for industrial production but
that “others” it. Mass-produced
clothing goes through so many
processes, places and machines
in its travels from the designer’s
sketchbook to our closets, and
yet it is so ubiquitous and normal
that we frequently don’t consider
the global industries and impli-
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cations of its production. Through
her paintings, Forsyth takes
these products, rich in material
history and political and economic significance, back to their most
basic component parts: colour,
line, and pattern, rendering the
original reference preternatural
in the process.
In creating a simulacrum of
these shirts, which themselves
epitomize our age of industrial
facsimile, Forsyth calls attention to how removed we are from
the production of items we use
every day. Our disassociation,
or abstraction from the Real is
effectively countered through
painterly abstraction. Although
Forsyth’s paintings are inherently representative, this second
order abstraction - as it serves
to dissociate and decontextualize the component elements of
Kevin’s Shirts , and by extension
all manufactured products, from
their original ground - forces us
to slow down and contemplate
the process of this new form of
creation. This forced change of
perspective is also compounded by the stylistic elements of
the paintings, which call to mind
the meditative quality of Agnes
Martin and similar artists associated with abstract expressionism. And ironically, it is this
abstraction that actually reintroduces the idea of the maker or
creator back into the process of
production. Upon close inspection, the artist’s hand is visible in
the subtle irregularities of paint
and composition – making visible
the labour of creation; a physical inscription of the methods
of production into the picture.
This maker is brought even more
evidently to the forefront as the
paintings are transcribed from
the page to the loom, and back to
the very roots of textile work, to
the traditionally “hand-made.”
Interestingly, Forsyth, a painter,
only learned to weave for this
project, feeling that the paintings
just needed to become textiles.
Where she enjoys the doubling
and tripling of the same pattern,
each version with its attendant
variations, this transposition of
the simulacra back (or forward)
into fibre re-contextualizes the
original subject. And even as
Kevin’s Shirts move through
these artistic iterations and are
abstracted further and further
from both the intent and implications of their initial form, to
Forsyth, all forms are her husband’s shirts. In this sense, all
the components of Kevin’s Shirts
are a paean to the intimate connections that we have with everyday objects. Forsyth notes that
artists are well placed to call our
attention to these connections
and relationships; painters often
work alone in the studio, seeing
and using the same objects every
day, imbuing them with almost a
magical, ritualistic significance.
Indeed it is these objects that
she saw every day that served as
inspiration for Forsyth – objects
that, although ordinary and mass
produced, were already inherently ripe with significance in their
status as markers of absence.
Kendra Ainsworth, Assistant Curator
at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, is an
interpretive planner and curator. She has
a Masters in Museum Studies and a B.A in
Cultural Anthropology from the University
of Toronto, and has been working in the
arts and culture sector for over six years.
She is strongly committed to making
If we view craft as a process, a
way of doing things, and something that is inherently tied to
material experience, perhaps
it is fitting that Kevin’s Shirts is
entirely dependent on process
– the transformation of artifact
to painting and then to textile
sculpture. Here, Forsyth’s artistic
practice in and of itself serves to
reinvigorate our notions of what
craft is. Not a lesser cousin to
“art” nor an essentially gendered
practice, it is a way of thinking
through the world, and our personal connections to our surroundings. And that is something
that we can all appreciate. ●
museums and galleries of contemporary
art and craft intellectually, physically
and emotionally accessible spaces for
visitors. Through creative curation and
interpretation, Kendra aims to remove
both intangible and tangible barriers to
public engagement with contemporary
art, and allow it to serve as a catalyst
9
for community building and intellectual
development for people of all ages. Past
projects have included exhibitions at
the Burlington Art Centre (The Art of the
Cut: Papercuttings by Lini Grol, 2013), the
Gardiner Museum (Sugar and Spice, 2011)
and the Art Gallery of Ontario (At Work:
Hesse, Goodwin, Martin, 2010).
Works
Franco
Arcieri
Astral Noise Costume, 2007
Performance
Rope, fabric, contact
microphone, amplifier,
standard microphone,
cassette tape, tape players
122 x 183 x 91 cm
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Claire
Ashley
another tasteless hunk, 2013
Spray paint on PVC coated
canvas and blower fan
274 x 305 x 305cm
12
13
Amanda
Browder
Future Phenomena, 2010
Donated fabric from citizens
of Brooklyn, NY
Unfolded 609 x 1158 cm
Folded 91 x 152 x 152 cm
14
15
Amanda Browder
Cascading Mississauga, 2013
Donated fabric from citizens of
Brooklyn, NY
2 pieces
122 x 91 x 107 cm
16
17
Lyn
Carter
Bouquet, 2012
Fabric and aluminum
274 x 244 x 244 cm
18
19
20
21
Lyn Carter
Skirt, 2011
Peau de soie silk and aluminum
262 x 34 x 119 cm
22
23
Lyn Carter
Dummy, 2012
Polyester knit fabric and
Styrofoam
155 x 335 x 335 cm
Kai Chan
What It Is I Came for,
I Turn and Turn, Part VI, 2004
Incense
244 x 915 x 36 cm
24
25
Kai Chan
Mirage, 2008
Silk thread, nails
178 x 229 (variable) x 2 cm
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Michelle
Forsyth
Kevin’s Shirt: Boxfresh, 2012
Gouache on paper
25.4 x 25.4 cm
Kevin’s Shirt: Arrow
(Made in the USA), 2012
Gouache on paper
25.4 x 25.4 cm
Kevin’s Shirt: Diamonds, 2012
Gouache on paper
25.4 x 25.4 cm
28
Kevin’s Shirt:
The North Face, 2012
Gouache on paper
25.4 x 25.4 cm
29
Hazel
Meyer
ding-dong Wall
(…s to the Ball), 2013
Fine gauge,
circular knit jersey
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Frog in
Hand
Wall, 2013
Photo: Voitek Pendrak
Cotton and wool, wooden
support structure; dance
performance
32
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Ed Pien
Corridor, 2010-2012
Rope, video projection,
drawing
Variable dimensions
34
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Anne
Wilson
Mess, 2006
Anne Wilson and Shawn Decker
collaboration
A single projection video and sound
installation derived from Errant Behaviors
Animator: Cat Solen; Post-production
Animators and Mastering: Mark Anderson
and Daniel Torrente
Copyright 2006 Anne Wilson
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Artist Profiles
Artist Profiles
Franco Arcieri is a sound based,
38
performance and installation artist,
originally from Peterborough Ontario
and now based in Toronto. His practice focuses on the tension inherent in
dichotomy and notions around otherness. When something or someone
is identified as something specific,
they/it are no longer something else.
Arcieri is interested in enacting or representing otherness and the absurdity of categorization. He manifests the physical aspects of his work
through sound, performance and the use of textiles and fibres techniques either in sound performances or interactive sound installations.
He has shown work and performed in galleries in Peterborough and
Toronto, such as Art Space, The Blue Tomato, The Cannery, and Creatures Collective. He also also worked as a studio assistant to the video
and electronic artist Steve Daniels who is currently the head of the new
media program at Ryerson University.
Claire Ashley is
from Edinburgh,
Scotland. She received a Bachelor of
Fine Arts from Gray’s School of Art,
Aberdeen, Scotland in 1993, and a
Masters of Fine Arts in 1995 from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. Selected
venues include: DeCordova Sculpture
Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; The
Icebox at Crane Arts, Philadelphia,
PA; The Museum of Contemporary Art and The Chicago Cultural
Center, Chicago, IL; Plug Projects, Kansas City, MO; Terrain, Oak
Park, IL; Carthage College, Kenosha, WI; SideCar Gallery, Hammond,
IN; Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL; and Hyde Park Art Center,
Chicago, IL. International venues include: gallerA1, Edinburgh, Scotland; and The Highland Institute for Contemporary Art, Inverness,
Scotland. She currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices, and Department of Painting and Drawing.
claireashley.com
Born in Missoula, MT in 1976,
Amanda Browder currently lives in
Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA/
MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2001, and taught
at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago from 2001-07. She has been
awarded grants from the Brooklyn
Arts Council and the Chicago Community Arts Assistant Program. Amanda
has exhibited internationally and
nationally in exhibitions such as: The Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn;
Nuit Blanche Public Art Festival / LEITMOTIF in Toronto; Mobinale in
Prague, Czechoslovakia; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Lothringer
14, Munich, Germany; White Columns, New York; No Longer Empty in
Brooklyn and The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. She is also a founding member of the art-podcast badatsports.com.
amandabrowder.com
39
Artist Profiles
Lyn Carter Lyn Carter is based
40
near Grand Valley, Ontario. She has
exhibited across Canada, in the U.S.A.,
Australia, Britain, Spain, Mexico and
China. In 2008 she created a sitespecific work for the Third Guangzhou
Triennial in Guangzhou, China. Her
work is represented in a number
of permanent collections, among
them the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
in Buffalo, U.S.A., the AstraZeneca
Collection in Mississauga, Ontario, Cambridge Galleries, Cambridge,
Ontario and the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Carter
teaches Sculpture in the Art & Art History Program, a collaborative
Honours B.A. Program between Sheridan College and the University of
Toronto Mississauga.
lyncarter.ca
Kai Chan is a graduate from Ontario
College of Art and has exhibited
across Canada, the United States,
Japan, Australia and Europe. He has
received numerous grants from the
Canada Council and the Ontario Arts
Council, as well as awards, including the Jean A. Chalmers National
Crafts Award, and the Saidye Bronfman Award for Excellence in the Fine
Crafts. Chan’s work is in the collection
of Musée d’art de Baie-Saint-Paul, Québec; Musée d’art de Joliette,
Québec; Museum London, Ontario; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon;
Musée des Arts Decoratifs de Montréal; the Canadian Museum of Civilization; the Library and Gallery, Cambridge, Ontario; Nordenfjeldske
Kunstindustrimusem, Norway and the Canada Council Art Bank. He is
represented by David Kaye Gallery, Toronto, Galerie Elena Lee, Montréal and Galerie Ra in Amsterdam.
kaichan.ca
holds a longstanding interest in ways of working that
require time and patience. Working in
silence, the artist exploits durational
and repetitive activities. She associates her process with mourning, and
through making, she works to express
an identification with the vulnerability
of others. Forsyth holds an MFA from
Rutgers University (New Brunswick,
NJ); and a BFA from the University
of Victoria (Victoria, BC). Her work has been exhibited internationally
at venues including: Mulherin + Pollard, (New York, NY); Zaum Projects (Lisbon, Portugal); Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA); Auxiliary
Projects (Brooklyn, NY); The Hunterdon Museum of Art (Clinton, NJ);
The Charleston Heights Arts Center (Las Vegas, NV); and Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC). She has been the recipient of two grants
from the Canada Council for the Arts and her work is included in Carte
Blanche, Vol. 2 - Painting (2008). She currently teaches painting at
OCAD U (Toronto, ON).
Michelle Forsyth
michelleforsyth.com
41
Artist Profiles
is a graduate of Sheridan Institute’s Crafts and Design
Program (Textiles), and the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago. Her studio
work has earned numerous awards
and been shown across Canada and
Internationally. Hamlyn was selected
to represent Canada at the International Craft Biennale in Cheongju,
South Korea and the Love Lace International Lace Competition at the
Power House Museum in Sydney, Australia. Her work has been shown
at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and is part of the permanent collections of the Cambridge Art Gallery, the Peel Board of Education, the Japanese Paper Place and the Cleveland University Hospitals.
Highlights of 2013 include a small solo show at the Art Gallery of Mississauga’s X-It Room, participation in the Biennale Internationale Du
Lin de Portneuf, and featured artist at Mississippi Mills 2013 Fibre Fest
just outside of Ottawa. She will be showing in Japan in November in A
Commitment to Washi - a show featuring Canadian artist working with
Japanese Washi paper.
Noelle Hamlyn
42
has explored dance
both nationally and internationally;
she trained, toured and performed
with the Canadian Contemporary
Dance Theatre (CCDT) in Toronto and
at Ladmmi in Montreal. In England
she completed a Masters in Contemporary Dance with distinction at the
London Contemporary Dance School.
Snell has worked with a vast range of
Colleen Snell
dance practitioners, including the Hofesh Shechter Dance Company,
Paul Smith, Michael Trent, Sue MacLennan and Andrew Harwood.
She is an artistic associate with TOES for Dance, a New York-Toronto
dance exchange with Julliard alumni. She has received choreographic
commissions from Cawthra Park Repertoire Ensemble, Port Credit
Buskerfest (2012, 2013), Mississauga Arts Council, TOES for Dance
and Mississauga Waterfront Festival (MWF). In December 2013, Snell
will undertake a research residency combining martial arts and dance
at Movingeast in London, England. She is fascinated by the written
word and hopes to pursue trans-disciplinary practice-as-research as
well as performance.
About Frog in Hand
Founded by two sisters, Noelle Hamlyn and Colleen Snell, Frog in Hand
informally began in 1990 with a backyard performance featuring a frog
circus. From this seminal performance springs our belief that art is lived
experience and can be found in the most humble places – including the
mud and grass of the backyard. Since our modest beginning we have
sought out a large group of collaborators – dancers, musicians, actors,
textile and visual artists who come together to create multi-disciplinary
performances in unusual spaces. Our company members have national
and international professional experience, having trained and performed
in Canada (Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal), the United States (Chicago, Miami, New York), Japan, China, Korea, Ireland, Israel, Australia
and England. On our travels we have taken our thought provoking, fun,
spontaneous stories to the streets, with support from the Ontario Arts
Council, Celebrate Ontario, the Art Gallery of Ontario, National Youth Arts
Week, the London School of Contemporary Dance, the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago and the City of Mississauga. We aim to create accessible productions with a high degree of artistic merit.
43
Artist Profiles
is an artist and sports
enthusiast based in Toronto. She
draws, makes comics, letterpress
prints, screen-printed multiples, felt
banners, videos, broadcasts, and constructs physical environments that
can be used for performance, collaboration, workshops and amateur
athletics. From the monumental to
the modest her projects range from
installations, intended to TAKE UP
SPACE, to small woven tags meant for an audience of one. She holds
an MFA from OCAD University (Toronto), a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and in her spare time pumps iron.
Hazel Meyer
44
Recent exhibitions include Separation Penetrates at Dutch Art Institute (Netherlands), More Than Two (Let It Make Itself), curated by
Micah Lexier, PowerPlant, (Toronto), No Theory No Cry at Art Metropole
(Toronto), Schlaegermusik with Annesley Black for Zukunftsmusik
(Stuttgart), Walls to the Ball at La Centrale (Montréal), All Hands on the
Archive : An Audience of Enablers Cannot Fail, with Logan MacDonald at
F.A.G. (Toronto), and flex your textile, John Conelley presents (New York).
hazelmeyer.com
has shown work at the Drawing Centre; the V&A, London; The
Goethe Institute, Berlin; AGO, Toronto;
Musée des beaux arts and Musée d’art
contemporain, Montreal; Songzhuang
Art Centre, Beijing; and the National
Art Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He
recently participated in the Sydney
Biennale and “Oh Canada”, at MASS
MoCA. This fall, Pien is presenting a
Ed Pien
new installation at the Moscow Biennale entitled Imaginary Dwelling.
His work is in collection that are included at FRAC Lorraine, Metz,
France; The National Art Gallery of Canada; Art Gallery of Ontario;
Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal. Musée des beaux arts, Montreal; Mendel Art Gallery; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of
North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; as well as other
institutions and private collections.
Pien is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto; Pierre-François
Ouellette Art Contemporain, Montreal; Galerie Maurits van de Laar,
The Hague.
Pien is based in Toronto and teaches part-time at the University of Toronto.
edpien.com
has been an exhibiting
fibre artist, a freelance teacher, exhibit
organizer and volunteer with many
organizations for 40 years. She was
a faculty member at OCA, Toronto in
1990, an Assistant Dean for 8 years,
and an Associate Professor retiring in
2009. That year her work was shown
in Unity and Diversity at the Cheongju
International Craft Biennale in Korea
and at the Fibre Festival in Oakville
where she was a juror. She had exhibitions, Piece by Piece at the VAC
in Bowmanville in 2010, Pattern & Beyond at the Lindsay Gallery and
Fabrication:The Textile Work of Judith Tinkl at Georgian College in
Barrie 2011 and Soft Geometry at the Esplanade Gallery in Medicine
Hat, Alberta in 2012. She has been president of both the Ontario Crafts
Council and Surfacing the now defunct textile organization. Her work is
always on display at Tinkls’ Gallery in Brock Township north of Toronto.
Judith Tinkl
tinklsgallery.com
45
Artist Profiles
is a Chicago-based
visual artist who creates sculpture,
drawings, performances, and video
animations that explore themes of
time, loss, private and social rituals. Her artwork embraces conceptual strategies and handwork using
everyday materials -- table linen,
bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread,
glass, and wire. Wilson’s artwork is
in the permanent collections of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago;
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Detroit Institute of
Arts; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the 21st Century
Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, among others.
She is the recipient of grants from the NASAD, the Driehaus Foundation, Artadia, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. She is currently
Professor in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Anne Wilson
46
annewilsonartist.com
This exhibition also includes periodic
and durational performances by
Catalina Gonzalez, Sandra Poczobut
and Johannes Zits.
is a Colombian/
Canadian visual artist who crosses the
boundaries of the worlds of fashion,
art and performance. Her expanded
notions of sculpture seek to challenge
the limits of the body and manipulate the body’s natural structures to
invent novel anatomical structures
and adornments. Also known as the
“Body Builder,” Gonzalez carries on a
dialogue between the female body and
its perimeters. Devising an emblematic, at times mythical evolutionary
silhouette of the female body, her work blurs and extends the female
body to uncharted territory. Seeing where the skin ends and the near
environment starts, her work resonates with visceral metaphors of
change, rebirth and transformation.
Catalina Gonzalez
Still Life, 2013, Performance at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
Photo by Voitek Pendrak.
47
Artist Profiles
is an installation/
performance artist and educator born
in Poland. Sandra grew up in the prairies of Alberta and has worked internationally in South Korea, Bosnia &
Herzegovina and currently resides in
Port Stanley, Ontario. Sandra studied
Visual Arts at the University of Alberta
and has completed an interdisciplinary Masters Degree from the University of Western Ontario merging
critical educational pedagogy with postmodern art production. She is
active member of the Art Gallery of Mississauga as a roster artist for
“Roots and Branches”, works as an instructor in the Continuing Studies Department at OCADU, and creates programing for Internationally
Trained Architects at JVS Toronto.
Johannes Zits is a
multi-disciplinary artist who explores
art making through various media,
including video, digital imaging, performance and collage. Since graduating with a BFA from York University
in 1984, Johannes Zits has shown his
work across Canada as well as internationally in a variety of venues.
Sandra Poczobut
48
Sandra’s work looks theoretically at issues relating to self-identity, immigration, diversity, gender and the dichotomies of nature and
manufacture. Recent exhibitions include installations at the “World of
Threads International Fiber Arts Show”, and at “The Artist Project”.
Connect/Contain, 2013, Performance at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
Photo by Ferit Onurlu. Models: Phoebe Wang, Janada Hawthorne DeSilva.
Johannes Zits
johanneszits.com
Bande, 2013, Performance at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
Photo by Ed Pien.
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