Friday, July 03, 2015

There Is No Such Thing As Summer Vacation

Since returning from Nashville, it has been something of whirlwind.  Getting back into my schedule, birthday celebrations, Canada Day celebrations (are they two or one thing?), and general socializing with loved ones has meant all that profound Ayurvedic information has gone out the window, for me personally anyway.  Yesterday my main food group was ice cream.  Can you say vāta aggravation?

In true vāta style, there is no time to linger on that - I have places to go and things to do!  At the end of August, I will be in two exhibitions, one of which I am co-curating.  There is work to be done for both of them.

The first exhibition is titled Interlacing Converations, which will be presented at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts in Inverness, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.  Interlacing Conversations explores intersections of traditional and experimental fibre arts. The exhibition celebrates projects made possible through collaboration and exchange across geographical and cultural distances.  I am co-curating this show with Elizabeth Whalley, who is the new director of the ICCA.  I think it will be very exciting because we will be presenting the work of some amazing artists such as Mackenzie Kelly-Frere, Barb Hunt and Janet Morton, among others, along side the work of local craftspeople from Cape Breton, without distinction between what is art and what is craft.  By this I mean that everything will get equal billing.  And yes, I realize that I have listed most of the fine artists by name and just lumped together the craftspeople but that is only because Elizabeth has been handling that end of things and I don't yet have their names.

Mackenzie is creating a site-specific piece in collaboration with local knitters that furthers one of his previous projects Air Over Land.  The new project, Cast-Offs, is a series of 50+ hand knit wind socks/flags that will simultaneously fly over Inverness, Nova Scotia, and Calgary, Alberta (or just outside of Calgary).  He created a Ravelry group for the project if you want more information or if you want to participate.  Check it out here (Ravelry link).  

There will be much other beautiful work and I will show images as it progresses.  For myself, I will be performing my SpinCycle piece (and I am very excited to have my Canadian premiere of that piece!) and re-installing To Stand in the Centre and See All Around in a new way.  I won't say too much more except that I am back at the black Shetland.

Interlacing Conversations opens on August 30th.

The other exhibition came about during my time up at The Saltonstall Foundation.  I had a studio visit with Mara Baldwin and Vin Manta of Ithaca College.  Vin wrote up a blog post about it here.  Mara, who is the curator of the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, then invited me to participate in their season opening show, Starting From Scratch.  Starting From Scratch uses Charlotte Perkins Gilmans novel, Herland, as a jumping off point to think about utopia, gender, isolation, exclusion, and community.   I will be re-purposing The Knitted Mile and creating a new Utopia Tent for this exhibition.  I am hoping to do an artist talk/performance while the exhibition is up in September.  More on that later!

Starting from Scratch opens August 24th.

Busy times!




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