Wendy K., of the Surface Design Association of Alberta, used the Slofemists embroidery pattern Margaret is a Verb to make these squares. They came in the mail this week. Thank you Wendy!
These buttons were gifted to Slofemists at the Calgary event...
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
Last week I was asked by the new Canadian Creative Commons Affiliate to be part of a salon on how artists are using the creative commons. This call sent me straight for the boxes of Mail Art that I accumulating during the final decade of the last millenium. From the top of one of the Renegade Library archive boxes, I found an "Add & Pass On" book that today is a perfect example of how marginalized artists in the 1990s were motivated to work collaboratively and in an international context. They were situating their early "scoial media" in the context of Fluxus and Ray Johnson. They were saying over, and over again: I make art in a social and open context.
Flux, September, 1996 (approx.), various contributors. From the Renegade Library archive (L. Klassen 1998- present).
At the salon, I also quoted a text that was written for the Creative Commons by Glen Lowry, Marina Roy, and Joomi Seo, Rob Stone, and Robert Sweeny during QR_U (an open school) at Emily Carr University Concourse Gallery last year. The entire text was written collaboratively over 24 hours using a shared google doc. It can be found in its entirety here: http://qruopenschool.ca/
This is the portion that I read at Creative Commons Salon:
Artists are amongst the most dedicated to the commons, as they do the most in funding the production of creative works that are freely shared with the public. In terms of the amount spent on promotion of the arts, this pales in comparison to the sheer number of talented artist who support their own practice through working in various capacities and making work “in supplement” to their daily labour in other forms of work. The remarkable commitment of artists and artist collectives is tempered by the extremes of a global art market and the “star making machinery” of certain art schools or programs. Within a creative economy, the work of art is highly ambivalent. On the upper edges, the creative output, cultural products of contemporary art stars might approach the returns on investment (ROIs) of more lucrative creative enterprises, such as the gaming industry; in the main, artists who can not be promoted and marketed as top flight entertainers are paid as artisans or more often than not, end up teaching applied skills. In this way, the ideals of the commons are difficult to separate from the necessities of sustainable creative practice.
(Glen Lowry, Marina Roy, and Joomi Seo, Rob Stone, Robert Sweeny, "What is the Open School of the Arts?", Collaobrative Text, QR_U (open school), 2011, page 5.)