TO DO Auction ~ TONIGHT!

Wednesday, June 27th, 6-10pm
2nd Floor gallery, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen st w.

**bidding closes at 9pm**

TOnight! Pop by the Gladstone Hotel and put your bid down for a selection of designed and hand-made objects by both notable and up-and-coming Toronto craftspeople and designers!!! #StufDsgnrsMake is the first annual silent auction put on by Toronto Design Offsite, in an ongoing effort to help continue funding this local design initiative. TO DO (for short) is a self-produced, indie design festival happening annually in January over the course of Toronto Design Week. You can check out my previous coverage of DO West Design which happened this past January, here. Come out and see what local designers are making! If you can't attend the auction but still want to show your support, you can help by donating online here.

Here is a selection of some of my favorite works up for bid tonight!!!

Bev Hisey - Pixel Cube

Lana Filippone - 'the embrace'

Kristen Lim Tung - vessels

 

































Tinsel & Sawdust - Aluminum bottles

Uppercase Magazine: Issue #11

I am writing this post in retrospect almost a year later.... after the recent birth of my friend's first child....
I first met Maria Felix while teaching a silk screen printing class out of my studio at Harbourfront Centre. Looking back upon this three-year position (that has recently ended) I am amazed at all of the wonderful and lasting friendships and opportunities that I have had over the course of the past three years.  
Upon my first introduction with Maria, amongst an oddball group of students, the two of us hit it off immediately! The class was situated during an insane time in my life, while I was in the midst of frantically learning to work in ceramics for a rapidly approaching deadline, and preparing to travel to Australia for the opening of my work in the Love Lace exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum.

The first night of our class, Maria and I had chatted about art, ideas, and the letterpress workshop she had recently taken at Bookhou, and I decided to ask her for some feedback on a project I was currently working on...
Upon seeing my work, she was interested in writing an article on her blog about it and asked me if that would be something I was interested in.
Of course, I said!
Not long after our five week class ended, she had contacted me with the idea of pitching it as an article to Uppercase Magazine, and sure enough the editor was thrilled!

After much planning, we met up with a photographer, who by some unusual circumstance I found out I had already known for years... and all of the pieces began to fall into place.
We met at my house on a hot sunny morning in July and began rearranging the space into what would be my ideal studio, (if only i had the room for it!) before beginning the process of documenting the story ...
I just wanted to take this opportunity to say a big congratulations to Maria and her new little bundle of joy, and to thank her and Natasha Bardin for putting together such a lovely article, almost a year ago now.
Uppercase is a beautiful magazine, please feel free to flip through and check out the magazine, as well as the article beginning on page 82. I hope you enjoy!

Open publication - Free publishing - More craft

Lace Flag: Up up and Away...

What a week! Unfortunately I just got word that my Lace Flag has been lifted from the flagpole at Jarvis and Wellesley, before I had the opportunity to even photograph it!

I'm feeling a little upset about the disappearance, but found out I will be making a series of four more flags for the Lillstreet Arts Centre, Rooftop Flag Installation Project coming up in Chicago!

You can find more information about the Lillstreet project here as well as below, and a post about my flag on the Tel-Talk blog here.

Fall 2012 Exhibitions and More!

Looks like the fall is shaping up to be an extremely busy season for me, with three shows already lined up and a couple more I am waiting to hear back from!!! This November I will be participating in two separate exhibitions as a part of the World of Threads Festival, you can find an interview I recently did with them here.

The first exhibition, entitled De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) is a part of the World of Threads -Common Thread International exhibition, and will open at the Joshua Creek Heritage Arts Centre in Oakville, from November 2-18. This exhibition will feature the work of 35 Canadian and international artists working in fibre to create sculpture, installation and works in 2D. 

The second exhibition entitled, Interlace, deconstruct, the spaces in between will open at Telephone Booth Gallery in the junction and feature works by myself, Pam Lobb and Noelle Hamlyn. Exhibition dates to be announced shortly... 

And finally! I recently found out I was accepted into a site specific flag installation at the Lillstreet Arts Centre in Chicago! This is a seemingly perfect follow up for the flag project I just completed for Wave Your Flag, as it will give me the opportunity to expand on the work, to make a series of four.

Over the next little while I will be experimenting with new ideas and processes and also exploring ways of re-enforcing materials to hold up against the aggressive Chicago wind!!! More info and photos to come!

In the meantime, I will leave you with some images of Polychromatic dye prints I am sampling for interlace, deconstruct... enjoy!

Wave Your Flag

This week I am going to be participating in a joint exhibition between Telephone Booth Gallery and Tel-Talk, A site-specific, public art intervention project, taking place in telephone booths across the city of Toronto. The installation series will culminate in an exhibition and telephone book style catalogue which will be launched during the opening at Telephone Booth Gallery this Friday, June 15th. As a part of the site specific installation series, I submitted a Lace Flag to the Wave Your Flag project, located at the Bell telephone booths at Jarvis and Wellesley. 

Here is a bit of information about the project, with more posts on Tel-Talk to come.

Wave Your Flag.

All citizens of Toronto and beyond are invited to hang a flag of their choosing for a two week period. An ad-hoc flag pole has been co-opted at the corner of Wellesley and Jarvis.

This project aims to animate a new form of citizen engaged public art. All are welcome to participate!

Your Flag is requested for flying !… The flag can be a political allegiance, national pride or a conceptual address on the meaning of flags, or you are welcome to interpret the platform with a personal flag of your own design and meaning. The goal of the project is not to censor the flag – rather to present the icon with respect and provide conversation on national or personal identity. The flag can be an existing flag, a hand made flag, a purchased flag, a personal interpretation of a flag. The “flag” is up to you as the participant to decide. The goal is to create dialogue at the corner of the intersection with the mark of private intention within public space. The intersection of Jarvis and Wellesley is highly trafficked by pedestrians and motorists throughout the day. All Flags displayed will be documented and presented as part of the exhibition at tel-talk.

As a response to the Wave Your Flag project, I am interested in presenting a flag that pays homage to textiles and the decorative arts, while bringing interior forms and objects into unfamiliar outdoor spaces.

By creating a lace-like flag full of holes, I am interested exploring the idea of a flag as a dysfunctional object, documenting how it responds to the forces of the environment, whether it will fly or drape delicately full of holes, and looking at the ways in which people respond to subverted textile objects as they are taken out of context and placed in new and interesting spaces.

My Lace Flag will be up at Jarvis and Wellesley over the course of the next two weeks if you would like to stop by and check it out! more photos of the installation to come!