Epi&Gus Projects is an inspiration... over 10 years in the making. It came to me But in a dream To have a celebratory space showcasing art and artists, those in the midst of taking daily journeys. Whether travelling within their minds, or those who take to the open road. Inspired by road trips I would take with my Dad. Along the highways and byways... he would point out a strong looking purple flower... asking me to name it... I would exclaim Epilobiam and gustafoliam!!! He would laugh... we would be listening to whatever rock music he had playing and we would just cruze... The fireweed. The true latin name of this flower is epilobium angustifolium... the only flower that began to grow on war torn ground after the bombings during the second world war... It is resilience.. art is resilience!! It is also an indigenous flower found across North American Highways, signalling to me a memory of allowing wishes to be set free from the constraints of daily stresses. The first of the series, of my curatorial project Epi&Gus Projects, was the shoe box gallery. Inspired by Kirsty Robertson’s Bookcase Micro Museum. An intimate space to house quiet dreams, text and oddities. The shoe box gallery was home to four exhibitions held over the course of four months, between January and May of 2017. The exhibitions were: Sarah Scope Good or Bad, Bill Nace Nole, Rene Vandenbrink Leftovers, and Ashley Snook Biophiliac Tendencies. This text is an accumulation of all written materials that developed during the showings, as well as my thoughts, a year later, as to what transpired in my tiny bachelorette apartment in Toronto, Ontario. The shoe box gallery was a micro museum where the art was supported by my first love... shoes. Inspiring the need to walk tall and strong and be fireweeds in this world torn apart by trauma!! JLF
Sarah Scope Good or Bad? January 19 – February 9 2017 Artist’s Statement: In the world that we are living in now many things are attached with positive and negative context. Here the artist analyses the medium used and how a piece with no hidden meaning can be given meaning through the eye of the beholder. SS
About Nothing It has been well over a year since I showcased Sarah Scope’s other worldly and delicately fabricated handi-orbits. I have difficulty bringing words to the pieces and to the experience one has with her work. Scope insisted the exhibition be concerned with Nothing. Without meaning, the works spun and swayed with the slightest movement. They are living works encompassed by their own micro-universal rules, demonstrating the hand of the artist in creating undiscoverable spaces within knitting. The most precious of the works, are those on paper. Scope meticulously knitted within the holes of once coiled lined paper. Leaving the observer to contemplate the diaristic traces left by her mind. JLF
Early in 2016, Bill Nace and I had an interesting exchange online. We became fast friends - for months we conversed about what might come in a playful yet soothing discusion. His guitar work is much like one would imagine when entering into a meditative state. One that allows the dips of pleasure to encompass the body from the tips of the toes to the fluttering of dream-enhanced eyelashes. I may have fallen in love, for a brief flicker of a rose. Before the thorns of circumstance revealed themselves. His collaged works reimagine the body, as though the inner secrets of the psyche are visable casings - being the first to encounter before the physicality of the body. Lately, I have difficulty articulating my understandings of the works shown in the shoe box gallery, as they are taken from another artist’s body of work - a woman artist/dancer Yvonne Rainer - work cut up, collaged into something new. Rainer’s dance works are considered existing within an ephemeral state, they last in memory. Bodily and psychically. As she articulates - dance works are like dust. They are traces of being there then. Nace takes these memorials - documentation of Rainer’s intimate movements and cuts them up, reattributes new static identities to a body in motion. My difficulty in writing about the work, and living with it for the month in 2017, was in knowing that as a male artist, Nace demonstrated a very destructive engagement with a woman’s bodily art and reappropriated it as he saw fit. The results are quite beautiful, and without any negative connotations. However, I’m left speechless thinking about the significance of a male artist cutting up the images of a female artist and molding them to his own liking. Writer Kimberly Barton, was better able to articulate Nace’s intentions with the work. Her piece was featured on Whitehot Magazine… and at the end of this section I share with you excerpts of this. All works are Untitled, and from 2017. JLF
Might Within the Micro: A Conversation with Bill Nace February 20, 2017 Kimberly Barton For Whitehot Magazine Having an extensive creative practice that spans both the aural and pictorial spheres, the work of Bill Nace can only be described as something visceral- it cannot just be seen or heard, but is something that must also be felt. Nace’s approach to the musical realm is in many ways quite similar to that of his carefully crafted and modestly sized collage images. Both are made in a moment, without intention, and allowed to grow organically as their own specimens. They are worlding experiences, proving that size and impact are hardly co-dependent. Kimberly Barton: You seem to work primarily in collage. What drew you to this as opposed to other mediums? BN: It’s all a similar approach to the collages. There’s a kind of “automatic” approach to it where I just kind of start without thinking much about it. Though with all of them there do seem to be certain shapes and compositional ideas that I naturally return to. But as far as approach, it seems close to how I work musically... I just sit down and try to be open to the moment and start to at least answer how they begin. KB: In past interviews, you’ve said that the goal for your work is to “evoke a kind of dream state” in your viewer. Do you find that the process of making is necessarily a subconscious one for yourself? What does your current process entail? BN: It is what I’m drawn to or keep going back to in terms of an approach hopefully to surprise myself. But I don’t think it has to be limited to that... and I’ve recently been trying to counter that approach by trying some things that are more deliberate. In terms of the images for Nole it’s definitely in line with the subconscious approach, yes. As I was saying earlier, I just kind of sit down and go. The source material can dictate a lot and these past groups of collages are all drawing from the work of Yvonne Rainer and dealing with the body. Yvonne Rainer was starting with something that people already project so much on to and was trying to move that into a more unfamiliar space. The collages use images of Yvonne Rainer’s work as source material. Working with images of the body was just kind of a challenge to myself. I usually start with something that’s more textural and already unrecognizable and then build a form from that. This is in a way moving from the opposite direction.
KB: At times there seems to be a fascination with movement and extensions of the body, and at others there’s this containment of forms. BN: Yes, some I wanted to feel like they were frozen in a moment and others to kind of exaggerate the movement a bit. Even something like extending an arm longer than it would normally be, but not necessarily in a way that I think someone would even notice at first... not to a cartoonish extent. I wanted the bodies to lose their familiarity and try to show that during different stages of becoming something else. And drawing from the subconscious approach is a way to get a world started for me, and then from there these kinds of things come into it. Specifically with these recent pieces. KB: Each image seems to be very much its own microcosm. BN: Oh good! In previous shows I think there’s more connection between the images, but, for this group I thought something a little more random or less cohesive would work. Especially considering the uniqueness of the setting and the separation of the cubicles that they’ll be displayed in. KB: What is it about Yvonne Rainer- or her body of work- that you find most influential? BN: I do love her work, although in retrospect some of these [images] feel like an homage of sorts and that wasn’t my initial intention. I was reading Being Watched- a book about her- and Byron Coley who runs Rozz Toxx asked me to do a show. I had the thought that I would use bodies as the source (something I had explicitly avoided in the past) just to see what it would be like. I do think some of the images share an idea of the reconfiguration of the body and space that she worked with. KB: I just have one final question, or thought really, in that It seems kind of an appropriate reflection for these self-enclosed universes you’ve created to be shown within this micro-gallery- each containing their own infinity of possibilities despite their size BN: I really like that...self-enclosed universes! I’m hoping they will read like little film stills maybe- each having their own screen to project on. I think when all of the works are hung together in a bigger space you start to make a narrative and maybe connect all these dots whether they were intended or not, but within the individual space they each have it will hopefully be like all these little specimens from different places, or film stills from many different films.
Living with Leftovers for a month was an interesting experience. My apartment was very small, and I felt like the space actually made me ill. I tried to keep it as tidy as I could, to a point where I felt consistent exhaustion. My frame felt stunted and my spirit seemed to be lacking my typical skip. As I write this, I am physically displaying the past containment -- my shoulders are slipping down and my back is hunching. Placing so many objects into the small squares of the shoebox gallery, at first completely overwhelmed me - and yet, as the weeks went on, I found something soothing about the objects. I would sit, and actually contemplate the position of each strand of Victoria’s Dreads, wondering how Victoria would feel to know her hair, from years ago, was in an exhibition? I imagined where the wrapped pieces of birch had travelled from. Were they whisked along the shore by the wind or the body of water? Did they dip in and out, what types of sounds did they remember? Rene Vandenbrink wrote her own texts about the exhibtion and pieces, and again, Kimberly Barton wrote an article for Good Trouble Magazine. Highlighting the beauty of Leftovers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Leftovers Text by: Rene Vandenbrink Creating art with found objects and textile processes helps repair oneself after being worn down by the confines and expectations of the world we share. Exploring nature presents opportunities for discovering and collecting objects while taking in fresh air and moving freely through space. When movement outside is restricted, escapism provides comfort through spinning, knitting, mending and wrapping objects as those actions are repetitive, meditative and perceived as harmless, appropriate and productive activities. Collections are derived from boulevard trash days, hand-me downs, walks and very occasionally objects are purchased used at second hand shops and yard sales. The objects found are desirable in form or their original purpose is recognized. They hold with them memories of their original place – in the forest, along a beach, along a highway, in my grandmother’s home, in a friend’s uncles home – times and places that are no longer accessible.
It is impossible to capture a nature walk through photography or video but by collecting objects that have fallen from trees like birch bark, you have the part of the tree and with it, it’s smell, it’s appearance, it’s sound, it’s touch. With cloth dyed from plant materials, the cloth or fleece dyed is capturing the remnants of the vegetation. Vegetation has a season when it grows and dies. By collecting pieces of it I can save elements of the vegetation’s visual appearance and odour in the cloth. Collecting objects that can no longer be utilized inhibits their destiny of becoming garbage, decomposing and altering in states which would no longer be accessible. They are kept, celebrated, given a place, wrapped in warmth and colourful threads, yarns, handspun materials. They are honoured rather than disregarded. They are transformed into something new.
Victoria’s Dreads When in college, I met a woman entering funeral services who had a gorgeous head of dreadlocks. She had to cut them off when looking for work, as funeral services is a rather conservative industry. She gifted me her dreads and they are arranged with twists of hand spun yarn made from papers collected from tissue wrapping of flowers, shoes and hand made Japanese tissue papers.
Etched Glass Etched Glass is comprised of two collections of bottles. One is a series of antique glass bottles, some etched with patterns and holding unique shapes. They come from a friend who didn’t have space for them anymore. The glass bottles are wrapped with various remnants of yarn and thread. One glass bottle had broken and is arranged in front of the others. The other collection of bottles were purchased for use in a print making studio. Lithography requires nitric acid and the safest and most controlled way to apply the acid to gum arabic is to use an eye dropper. Glass eye droppers had to be purchased through the chemistry department and came with the brown bottles. The bottles weren’t needed. These little brown bottles are wrapped in indigo dyed threads and found blue threads. Seed Starters Gardening is a way of avoiding commercial food sources. It starts with purchasing seeds from small local companies providing organic heirloom fruit and vegetable seeds. These seeds are sometimes started indoors often using recycled containers like tetra packs, yogurt containers and bottles. This is a collection of toilet paper rolls saved for holding soil to start seeds. The paper rolls were cut on the bottom, folded, wrapped in unbleached cotton and pink wool threads. These containers were from seeds and seedlings that failed to thrive.
In Memorium I, II, III, IV The In Memorium series is comprised of cut up suits worn to work during my employment with a funeral home. For nearly a decade, I worked in an industry which wore on me in uncomfortable ways and when leaving, it was very difficult to part with this clothing.
Suits were often times constricting, stuffy and bleak with some having been tailored to my form, others were poorly fitted hand-me-downs or clearance items. The suits were made of different woven threads in dark variations of black. The materials were cut into strips with elements of the suit kept intact including lapels, cuffs with buttons, zippered pockets and care instruction labels. These fabrics were rolled and wrapped in colourful threads, hand spun paper yarn, wool or other fabrics. They are displayed with blue fabrics that are wrapped in funeral suit strips and lace.
Since these suits are not at work, they can be paired with colour again and wrapped in its joy and warmth.
Pods and Shuttles Goldenrod pods were found along a creek bed in London. They have been collected in the past to create spinning tops with the pod being wrapped in colourful thread and shellacked with a glue and water solution. This was first done for Sarah Scope's In A Pinch pop up gallery utilizing Jamie Q's Teenie Weenie Zine Machine, which converted a bubble style vending machine into a way for people to buy small zines and in Sarah's show, small sculptures for a twoonie. The pods in Pods and Shuttles were not well suited for spinning tops due to their form and so have been wrapped in yarns, fleece, handspun paper yarn and arranged with antique shuttles, a handme-down loom reed and a beater.
Coasters, Bells and Ducks My grandmother recently downsized leaving me some older objects like hand carved coasters with ivory inlays and little white bells with cloth flowers from a wedding she attended. A friend who no longer had room for his duck collection and gifted me four wooden ducks who wear my bangles when I am not wearing them. These objects are arranged with hand-me-down lace which I had dyed purple over a decade ago. Birch Bark Bed Birch Bark Bed is a collection of birch bark found on the forest floors of a bush lot in Southwestern Ontario, wooded area in the Muskokas and a wood lot along Lake Huron. Each piece of bark has its own unique colouration and curves. Some still have wood and lichens attached. They are situated on the floor of the shoe box acting as a bed for the fungi collections from the same locations the bark was collected from. Behind the bed is a mass of fabrics solar dyed using plant material from along the Thames River's shore. They are fallen, decaying materials that are fragile and finding rest in their shoe box home.
Brushes Brushes includes a broken carder for carding fleece that was purchased intact some years ago second hand at a fleece festival in Woodstock. Shoe shine brushes were purchased second had for a sculpture that didn't turn out well. A small bamboo handled brush came from a cosmetics and restorative art course I took in college for funeral services. The other brushes come from my grandmother and include a brush for sweeping, a make up brush, an ornate hairbrush. Wood Wrapped Warp During the fall of 2009, I walked along the Thames River in a wooded area every Friday morning collecting branches that had fallen from the trees. Each branch was measured into 3 inch lengths and cut down with a band saw. It was part of an installation later that year. Some of the remaining segments were used to tie off a not so successfully set up warp on a hand-me-down loom. Once the weaving was completed the ends were cut and wound around the wood weights. They are piled together as a memento of the weaving experience and the nature walks of 2009.
Broken Again Rather than throwing out a broken bamboo cutting board, broken outlet, broken hair bands and broken silkscreen squeegee, I wrapped them in found threads, hand spun yarns and wool. The wrapping mends the objects and brings them together in my home. Erie’s Shore, Montana Highway and Bonavista’s Edge: Smooth stones collected from Lake Erie’s shores form a central pile. Growing up near this lake, I have walked the shores collecting stones, bones, glass and wood for much of my lifetime. The shallow lake erodes the surfaces of these objects making them small and smooth. Broken pieces of the center line painted on a Montana highway lead a path to the pile. Encircling the pile of stones are remnants of life or stones that were encrusted with red algae and calcified found along the coasts of Newfoundland. Home is always close to the shores of Lake Erie, no matter how far I happen to be. It is at the center of my memories and the centerpiece of this arrangement of collections. Bones and Lace: Bones collected from meals, walks along the beach and adventures in the ditch have been used for other art works, costumes and home decorations. Some are dyed, wrapped, shellacked or attached to ribbon. A base of dyed and painted bones strung with yarns are coiled to create a circular base for the remaining bone collections to rest on. Salvaged lace is tucked under the bones. Pockets and Cones: I never wore blue jeans until a few years ago. A friend had given me her worn out jeans to make pillows. The pockets of the jeans were never utilized and saved. Cones of threads that would have been used for sewing clothing commercially were acquired at a local yard sale. Together the collections speak to a process of creating clothing that is far removed from the home for many.
Quiet Riot- Rene Vandenbrink’s Protest in Soft Sculpture April 13, 2017 Kimberly Barton for Good Trouble Magazine The handmade can be a powerful tool, allowing the creator of an artwork to construct with full autonomy. Choosing materials, deciding scale or curating an object’s arrangement can become a resilient act of self-expression. The makers-movement of employing the practicality of craft practices to satisfy the artistic, can also be an act of defiance- or at least this is the case for Canadian textile artist Rene Vandenbrink. Based in London, Ontario, Vandenbrink actively seeks alternatives to the waste and want of contemporary commercial culture. With a BFA from Western University, a trained Funeral Director and a community art activist, Vandenbrink considers, “how our society discards so much so fast. Consumerism has been detrimental to our planet and the people who are trying to exist on it. People work really hard to buy things they are going to throw away. A lot of the objects that are thrown away are still useful.” Leftovers- Vandenbrink’s current exhibition at the Shoebox Gallery in Toronto, incorporates a fusion of salvaged objects with collections obtained from nature that are wound with hand-spun/hand-died yarn. Strategically placed and wrapped fragments of her former funeral director’s uniform, In Memorium I, II, III, &VI (2017) juxtaposed with a kitschy assortment of inherited ceramic Ducks, Bells and Costers (2017), fragments of river-side finds of Birch Bark, and wood, and a carefully arranged nest of Victoria’s Dreds (2017) are a few of the miniature installations used to comment on the state of consumerism in North America. “I don’t want to engage with consumerism, I avoid it any way I can and so ‘making do’ allows me to live comfortably without having to buy into these systems. It is a meditative practice to arrange objects collected, to knit, to spin yarn, to felt things. In a way, it protests on a quiet level. It is my way of loving the earth and trying to keep from harming it. It is also a way of protecting myself from engaging in more stress than necessary.”
Domestic dissidence is a common thread linking Vandenbrink to the Shoebox. A formidable “fuck you” to the institutionalized spaces that see recent art graduates at every level as sources of free labour, Jennifer Lorraine Fraser’s Shoebox Gallery takes matters into her own hands, or rather, her own tiny apartment. By displaying Leftovers, Vandenbrink describes, “These are leftover collections that exist in my home and are being shared with others by visiting Jen’s home. It is always interesting to exhibit art in settings outside of the white cube gallery system. I hope that people in general will be more open to experiencing art in different settings.”
Ashley Snook is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist and received her MFA from OCAD University. In her practice, Snook examines the interconnectivity between nonhuman and human animals, and vegetal/botanical life. Within this examination, she questions the notion of humanness in relation to the concept of biophilia—the innate curiosity of the biosphere and animals. Within the creation of corporeal artworks that amalgamate different characteristics across species lines, Snook uses synthetic and organic material within her practice which is predominant in sculpture, installation and drawing.
1. An Interspecies Memoir, Polyester resin, hair, 2016 2. Sampling Kinship Glass test tubes, soil, chia seeds, plaster, wax, fur, organic material, 2015-2016 3. Unearthed plaster, string, silicone rubber, organic materials, 2016 4. Untitled (Icosahedron Matter), Plaster, moss, fur, nail clippings, pyrate, mix media, 2015 5. Cerebral Soil Wax, dog fur, soil, pigment, 2015 6. Untitled, 2015 7. Untitled, 2017 Drawings: Interconnectivity, series, 2015
I thought if I let time pass - it would become easier to write about Ashley Snook’s work. It’s not. The power of her work is what I imagine a shaman or female diety to encompass and distribute. Living with her work for a month brought me intense dreams. For the years I lived in apartment #208, I think I forgot to dream. I felt closed in, contained... without being able to move. The crystals reflected back to myself my hopes for the present. I returned to truly feel like I could live in the moment. I was not left yearning for what would possibly not be... I was living then. Snook’s sculpture intensified the feeling of presence, awe, fear and acceptance. Please read her MFA Thesis, Intraspeciation Within the Ontological Biosphere. It can be found online here: http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/ eprint/545/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Thank you Sarah Scope Bill Nace Rene Vandenbrink Ashley Snook Kimberly Barton Rod Stanley Noah Becker and to everyone who visited the shoe box gallery Jan - May, 2017
Keep an eye out for The Pink Door Gallery The second series for Epi&Gus Projects
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