At the Contemporary Art Gallery last week visiting curators from Germany reminded me of this very common German suffix. When Verein is appended to its subject, it describes the inherent sociability of that subject. It means something like an active membership or association or group working together.

Kunstverein is something like the more established artist-run institutions in Canada in that they are art institutions that have been built up from a community of active members. Bart van der Heide, the director of Kunstverein Munich, described how he had come to love his institution's verein: a group of lovable and loving mostly middle age or elderly women who continuted to act as long term members, donors and champions of the institution.

Mostly, I remember hearing the words neiverein and frauenverein - the sewing groups and women's groups that my grandmothers eagerly attended on at least a weekly basis. I can hear these words spilling out of their mouths repeatedly, so much as to accumulate in mounds on the scrubbed surfaces of both their kitchens. Verein, verein, verein, verein was affectionately cited in almost all talking - it was creditted for gossip and for tragic news and for brilliant insights and all manner of resolution and restitution in one's local and larger universe...

screen shot - "Frauenverein" image search, Google, 20140521

Here is a new zine published by the alumni, students, and faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts. In their introduction, the editors suggest that each issue will be featuring a geographical as well as thematic focus. To start, the region featured is "La Frontera," the Mexican north / the US southwest; and the theme is "slow." Pam Calore, an alumni of VCFA who lives and works in San Deigo, sent me a link to this zine because her contribution to it features a photo that she took of one of the blankets made by way of my project Comforter Art Action. Pam delivered that blanket to a shelter for deported migrants in Tijuana. She fittingly paired the blanket photo with one she took of a protest sign at the Mexican/US border: "No Militariza[...] La Frontera" | "Angeles Sin Fronteras". The sign is partially obscured by drying clothes, evidence of the daily and personal costs of the militarized border. This edition of here ends with a manifesto by Faith Wilding that works by chronicling a day well spent in mindful attention to its pleasures, including its delays.

"Don't let speed control you. The slow body's pleasures and pains are part of your radical subjectivity." Faith Wilding, "Manifesto for the Slow Body-Mind," Here, VCFA (2014)

This notice came by email this week. If you are in Calgary, you might want to join artists, Linda Hawke and Cat Schick at the Women's Centre. They are offering the public the opportunity to make blankets with others.

Remember the austerity of Swedish design? Remember the clean lines and huge expanses of white, cut through with perfectly placed blue pencil lines? Forget all that. This is what greets visitors at the entrance to the new Ikea-mega-complex in Richmond:

WOW.

I have an untested theory that the quantity of textiles that we encounter in designed spces (retail displays, show rooms, new restaurants, etc.) is inversely proportional to the cost of textiles, and their transport to North America. In the last ten or twenty years (since NAFTA, infact) retail fabric stores have closed, restaurants have become fabric-free, curtains and tapestries are no where to be found in this city of glass... But look: Ikea has obviously sourced very inexpensive expanses of printed cloth, and even a cheap sewing machine to take home! None of this adheres to an ecological 100-mile way of living, but then:

"The Office for Soft Architecture finds the chaos of variation beautiful. We believe that structure or fundament itself, in its inert eternity, has already been adequately documented--the same skeleton repeating itself continuously. We are grateful for these memorial documents. But the chaos of surfaces compells us towards new states of happiness." Lisa Robertson, "Rubus Armeniacus: A Common Architectural Motif in the Temperate Mesophytic Region" in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture.

Finished today, the latest Comforter Art Action:

Emily Simpson designed it from the box of mail-art-derived 6" squares in my studio. It was knotted on the street in downtown Vancouver as part of the Manomano Collective's TOGETHER 2012, street intervention (August 25, 2012) - manomano

About a month ago I was sent links to these two, contrasting, motion pictures about blanket projects. Like a curator who has stumbled on contrasting but cohesive artifacts/creations, I wanted to put them side by side in a blog post, to show the depth of meaning that is embedded  in projects about blankets.

First, Pamela Calore from San Diego sent me a very simple image archive that she put together after spending a day in the company of Micaela Saucedo who is shown dstributing food and blankets for migrants in shelters and canals in her city. It is a collection of pitcutres that document the extreme living conditions for some of the homeless in border cities, and the work of people who are try to make their lives a little more bearable. Pamela is an artist and activist who works for the San Diego-based Border Angels advocacy group. Their activities can be followed here - borderangels.org

 

Next, Yvonne Mullock sent me a link to a blog that she has helped to set up for a group of Fogo Island quilters in Newfoundland - quiltyquilts.blogspot.ca On the blog, I came across this video that Tim Wilson created with the backing of the Shorefast Foundation. The Shorefast Foundation is funding Yvonne's work with the quilters. They aim to create a massive stash of quilts to be used (showcased) on beds of the soon to be opened Fogo Island Inn. This short video gives a taste of the culture that produces the blankets, through a skilled, multi-generational group of women. Even the mummers show up... so it doubles as a holiday greeting.

 

OLD HANDS: The Quilts of Change and Fogo Islands from Shorefast Foundation on Vimeo.

Both of these videos are inpsiring a new chapter (a renewed action) in Comforter Art Action. Stay Tuned... let me know if you want to make a blanket(s) with me in 2013! loiszing[AT]telus[DOT]net

This is late, but I want to acknowledge the hospitality and comforts offered to me and the project, Comforter Art-Action, way back on Februray 24-25 2012 by Kriss Boggild. Kriss hosted a retreat of sorts, for her and Elaine Mari and me at her recently renovated Mayne Island home. We ate and talked and sewed; caught up on life and had long conversations about textiles, and other cultural observations, frustrations, and puzzelments within our lives. As a result, we completed four lovely knotted blankets which will soon be delivered to MCC, for distribution to a displaced person or family, somewhere out in the world.

Thank you to Kriss and Elaine for a restorative weekend, and for putting something of yourselves into the on-going Comforter Art Action project. I really admire your insights into art and life and, by extension, your multiple intellegences.

 

Congratulations to Margaret Dragu on winning one of this year's prestigeous Governor-General's Awards in Visual Arts and Media. How great it is to see her long career of gestures and interventions, correspondences, conversations, dances, bike rides, fictions -- in a word, AKTIONS-- recognized by the Canadian art world. Margaret has ammassed a vocabulary of art actions that describe to me a way of integrating creative experiments into a daily life and community. Living on the shoreline of an enormous land, she coreographs her body and the bodies of those around her to describe the conditions that we experience as individuals and as a collective.

Thank you for all of your encouragement, and your inspiration Margaret. And thank you for the mending aktions... sewing with me.

 

Read more about Margaret Dragu's Governor-General's Award here.