Lisa Anne Auerbach - Video

In this video Lisa Anne Auerbach explains how her art works in the 2014 Whitney Biennial are meant to be examples of alternative publishing. By this, I think she means that her knitted items can carry around and display a legible narrative, by way of text and symbol. Using a knitting machine, she makes garments that record her chants & rants ("keep abortion legal"), her past times (food and drink are represented with readable symbols), her collections (an archive of psychics' predictions makes up a large banner). Also, to make the publishing theme unavoidable, she has included in the show a "megazine" -- an oversize publication that documents her research into psychics at work.

In the video she comments on her self-sufficiency in the works' production. Really, it is her use of studio-sized industrial machines that makes her self sufficient. The oversize colour printer is pictured, and the knitting machine cannot be too far away. I find this intriguing: her work refers to DIY culture (yarn bombing and 'zine culture), but through the works' materials and processes, she has forced this aesthetic through industrial processing. Is she claiming a creative territory in the rapidly expanding world of rapid prototyping? What does the "maker" culture think of her work? What is retained from the DIY in her large-scale, quick-copy publishing?

Her work is well placed in this iteration of the Whitney Biennial since so much of the selected work concerns the "complex relationships between linguistic and visual forms," in the words of her curator, Stuart Comer. I thought the exhibition in its enormity displayed the complex relationships between visual forms and just about everything else. Much of the work situated art practices in other worlds, and situated other worlds (publishing, archiving, narrative film...) inside the world of art.

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial

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)

We are excited to offer special guests at our upcoming 2014 Slofemists events.

We hope you can make it to one or more of these studio embroidery circles in Vancouver, Canada:

Saturday, February 8, 1-3pm = Special Guest, Elisa Ferrari will talk about how she came to embroider an Alighiero Boetti textile. We hope to bring a feminist frame to his iconic textile work.

Saturday, February 22, 1-3 pm = Special Guest, Cindy Mochizuki will discuss her grandmother’s practice in the Japanese art of Bunka Shishu (or thread painting).

Saturday, March 29, 1-3 pm = Special Guest, Lexie Owen will talk about why her projects (The Collaborative Embroidery Society, and more) bring critical theory alongside handwork like embroidery.

These are small, free events that take place at the Yukon Street studio near the O. Village Sky Train station. No skill or equipment is needed (but you are invited to bring your own embroidery supplies if you have them.) Please send an email [loisATloisklassenDOTcom] to reserve a place, and to get details on the location.

[[Note the change of dates from previous posts.]]

Join us to embroider in 2014 !

Slofemists will be meeting monthly at the Yukon Studio for Feminist embroidery. Bring your Feminist stories, inspirations, and ideas. We'll supply the embroidery materials, equipment and a growing archive of patterns.

2014 dates: January 25, February 22, March 29 - 1-3pm

RSVP: loiszing[at]telus[point]com

We are hoping to have a few special guests... more details on that to come. We'd love to stitch with you!

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!

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 These buttons were gifted to Slofemists at the Calgary event...

The Strathcona Field House Ensemble will be hosting a Slofemists embroidery cricle on Saturday afternoon. In keeping with the Ensemble's on-going practice of exchange, participants are invited to bring a personal feminist story in exchange for a take home feminist embroidery pattern... and in exchange for an afternoon of embroidery. The details are here - Download SFHE Flyer and here - http://fieldhouseensemble.tumblr.com/

 Also stay tuned for Slofemits events at the Yukon Studio (Vancouver) in the new year: January 25, Febrary 22, March 29...

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

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.)

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.