Thanks to everyone who came out to the vernissage on Friday!

If you missed out, you can still check out the exhibit until Tuesday, August 30th. Open everyday, 12-5pm.

We are excited to announce that the exhibition of HEIR/LOOMS will be accompanied by limited edition catalogue! The catalogue features the work of all 12 participating artists as well as essays by Meghan Bissonette, Anastasia Hare, Colleen O’Reilly, Esther Kalaba and Amber Berson.

The catalogue can be purchased for $10 at Studio Beluga during the run of the exhibit (August 26-30, 2011). If you are interested in purchasing a catalogue but are unable to attend the exhibit, you can order one here:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/HeirLoomsExhibit

Vanessa Yanow will be staging an interactive performance piece at the vernissage of HEIR/LOOMS entitled, Cashmere Moments. Last year when her paternal grandmother died, Yanow inherited entire collection of cashmere sweaters. Images and text will emerge onto the sticky paper of a lint roller, which the audience is encouraged to roll on Yanow’s cashmere-worn torso.

If you in the Hamiton-area on August 12-13th be sure to stop by the Beehive Summer Craft Fair to see some work by Thea Haines, Amanda McCavour and Samantha Purdy!

A great review of Thea Haines’ Good Housekeeping show, at the you me gallery in Hamilton until August 7th.

Hello friends + friends of friends,

I am the curatorial consultant for ‘Heir/Looms’ an exhibition being held at Studio Béluga in late August (www.studiobeluga.ca). The show is about inherited objects, labours, and materials, and how contemporary craftwork is inevitably woven through with cultural and personal legacies of making — particularly the handwork of our grandmothers. The exhibit includes fiber-based works that revisit and reconstruct familial and cultural heirlooms, or explore the connections between craft and memory/preservation. We are seeking written work that reflects on these topics (and related themes) for the exhibition catalogue. I am hoping you would be interested in contributing.

We are accepting submissions of works of varying lengths (no more than 1500 words), in either French or English. The catalogue is a limited edition run, and will be distributed at the exhibition. We hope that it, like the exhibition, will contribute to the ongoing discussions of craft as an art form, the relationship of the personal to the societal, and the place of materiality in the aesthetic experience. It will also profile a selection of the 11 artists participating in the exhibition; if you are interested in interviewing one or more of the artists for this section, we would be happy to facilitate this.

Please send a short description of the piece you would like to contribute (up to 200 words) by Friday, July 22nd. The deadline for submissions is Monday, August 8th. Please contact Nicole or myself at heirloomexhibit@gmail.com if you have questions or would like to send a submission.

Best wishes,

Svea Vikander

Amanda McCavour:

Amanda McCavour holds a BFA from York University where she studied drawing and installation.  She has participated in international exhibitions and has recently completed residencies at Harbourfront Centre’s Textile Studio in Toronto and at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City. McCavour uses a sewing machine to create thread drawings and installations by sewing into a fabric that dissolves in water.  She is interested in the vulnerability of thread, its ability to unravel, and its strength when it is sewn together.

Carl Stewart:

Carl Stewart is a weaver living and working in Ottawa, Ontario. Recent solo exhibitions include fragments, Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax, NS, May 2011 and warehouse, Rails End Gallery, Haliburton, ON, 2010. In January 2012 he will present belated at the Centrepointe Theatre Gallery, Ottawa, ON.Recent group exhibitions include Around the Frayed Edges, Minden, ON 2010 and Masterworks East, a touring exhibition organized by the Ontario Crafts Council in 2009. For 14 years he was a member of the Enriched Bread Artists during which time he participated in more than 30 exhibitions most recently, graffiti and POP THAT. He has received financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa. His work hangs in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Ottawa and the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, New York, NY as well as in numerous private collections in Canada, the United States, Ireland and Israel.

Jennifer Smith-Windsor:

Jennifer Smith-Windsor is a Canadian textile artist currently residing in Ottawa, Canada.  She studied costume, textiles and design in Canada and England and worked in the theatre and with museums. Her works use second-hand textiles, hand and machine embroidery and often reference historical costume and textiles. She is concerned with the transience of the human condition and the capacity of cloth to express this fragility and vulnerability.  

Lizz Aston:

Lizz Aston is a fibre-based artist, born in Toronto, Ontario. She has studied Textiles at the School of Craft and Design, Sheridan College and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. Inspired by both traditional and contemporary textile processes, her work examines the relationships and residual connections we feel to domestic textile practices and objects of the past. She is currently working towards a number of collaborations that will see her work expand in the form of both furniture and ceramics.

Meichen Waxer:

Meichen Waxer has always been fascinated with ideas of fantasy, constructed histories and melancholy. Elements of female craft and body are interwoven into her interdisciplinary practice where she dances around the fine lines between anxiety, obsession and occupation. Meichen holds her BFA from OCAD, and has lived in Toronto, Montreal, and Paris and is currently based in Toronto. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the Toronto Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant.     

Megarrah Buxton:

Megarrah Buxton is a photo-based artist who lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. Drawing upon items left behind by her grandmother, such as old photographs and button collections, she has chosen to explore two mediums that have been prominent throughout her family’s history, photography and sewing, as a way to link herself between the past and the present. She is interested in the performative quality that an image can carry, whether through the dominant presence of an object in a photograph, or the permanent trace left by the act of a stitch.

Samantha Purdy:

Samantha Purdy is an embroidery artist living and working in Montreal. She is the co-owner of a small business called Pin Pals, specializing in cross-stitch accessories and paper puppet dolls. 

Her work has been displayed in the Bata shoe museum, Denver Museum of Miniatures Dolls & Toys, as well as numerous group shows in Montreal.  Her inspirations include folk art, children’s book illustration, vintage craft books and cats.

Sarah Gotowka:

Sarah Gotowka was born in South Korea in 1984, and grew up in the suburbs of Rochester, New York. She received her BFA in Fiber from the Cleveland Institute of Art and is now a seeking her MFA degree at Concordia University in Fibres. She approaches her work as a documentation of contemporary North American culture, specifically their courtship rituals and mating practices, which almost always involves a tightly fit garment and mutual alcohol consumption.

Suzen Green:

Suzen Green is a Newfoundland-born visual artist based in Montreal, Q.C. Her studio practice includes sculpture, (un)traditional textiles and performance. Often working in reference to her home province, Green uses specific cultural connections such as craft and folk history to examine larger issues of place, relationships and identity.

Tara Bursey:

Tara Bursey is a recent graduate of the Toronto School of Art’s Diploma Program (2006) and Independent Studio Program (2008). An artist whose practice encompasses sculpture and installation as well as drawing, craft, and self-publishing, Tara’s work is often characterized by its use delicate sculptural materials such paper and food. In the past few years, she has exhibited extensively throughout Toronto in a diverse range of venues, from storefront window installations and telephone poles to the Textile Museum of Canada, the Ontario Crafts Council, as well as in group exhibitions in Halifax, Saskatoon and Copenhagen. Tara’s most recent projects include coordinating The Portable Library Project as well as installation and exhibition programming for City of Craft, a contemporary craft event that takes place in Toronto. She began studies towards a degree in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University in September of 2009.

Thea Haines:

Thea Haines studied Textile Design at Sheridan College and holds an Honours Degree in Art and Comparative Literature from McMaster University. Her interest in textiles grew out of her fascination with the history of domestic space and social mores, and the inherent connection of textiles to all aspects of human life and culture. Her current body of work references language of instruction, etiquette, and correspondence, which formerly dictated the constructs of domestic life, and often incorporates pieces from her collection of disused household objects. Employing contemporary print processes, natural dyes and earth pigments and traditional hand stitching methods, her work is largely installation-based. Recent work explores women’s work of the past (tasks such as cooking and preserving, cleaning, sewing) and leisure activities (album-keeping, letter writing, collecting botanica and ephemera). She was a resident in the Textile Studio at Harbourfront Centre from 2006-2009. Currently she is an instructor and acting technologist in the Textile Studio of Sheridan College’s Craft and Design Program. She will be completing her MA in Textile Design at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, United Kingdom in 2012.

Vanessa Yanow:

Vanessa Yanow is a Montreal artist working with textiles and glass. She has received numerous grants and scholarships, and been featured in many publications as an exceptional fine craftsperson, but her BFA in Paint from RISD points back to a grounding in fine arts, lending her work a unique strength that defies categorisation. She has shown in museums in Canada, and in galleries and art fairs internationally. Her work is part of the city of Montreal’s permanent collection and in the Musée National in Québec City.

 heirloomexhibit@gmail.com