August 27–December 27, 2015

10 :MEMORYMEMORY

The Gladstone Hotel’s 10th Annual Juried Textile and Fibre Arts Exhibition

10 :MEMORYMEMORY

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The tenth annual edition of the Gladstone Hotel’s signature show of textile-based art explores the many complex relationships between cloth and memory.

Memory winds its way through textiles, a constant thread that runs through the earliest archaeological fragments, the latest experimental synthetics and everything in between. Textiles hold memory, recall memory, record — and occasionally obscure — memory. In some recent incarnations they even have memory.

Hard Twist has become an important annual event within the Canadian textile art community as well as a signature event for the Gladstone.

HARD TWIST 10: MEMORY

HARD TWIST 10 jURORS: Melanie Egan: Head of Craft and Design, Harbourfront Centre Elizabeth Elliott: Textile Artist, Toronto Sarah Quinton: Curatorial Director, Textile Museum of Canada

HARD TWIST 10 CURATORS: Helena Frei and Chris Mitchell

Exhibition Coordination by Lukus Toane Catalogue designed by Allison Chan

The Gladstone Hotel’s 10th Annual Juried Textile and Fibre Arts Exhibition

ALEC SUTHERLANDwww.nutshellarcade.com

I’m an artist who specializes in knitting and weaving and am currently studying at the Montréal Centre for Contemporary Textiles. I’m interested in the process, production, and perception of textiles in both historical and modern contexts. My work subverts the traditional ideas of function and style in craft.

Reworn is a series of reconstructions of textiles based on old childhood photographs. They explore how the photographs we take distort and define our memories of people, places and things. They also contrast the intangible, fluid nature of memory with the static, anachronistic nature of photography.

FAIR ISLE TOQUEWool11.5” x 8”2015

RED SWEATERWool20” x 24”2015

Reworn

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ANDREA VANDER KOOIJ

The Mend Collection

www.andreavanderkooij.com

Found, mended bed sheet, laced over wooden support14” x 19” x 1.75”2015

Found, mended dress, laced over wooden support,10” x 12” x 1.75”2015

Found, mended blanket, laced over wooden support9” x 7” x 1.75”2015

Found, mended bed sheet, laced over wooden support,14” x 16” x 1.75”2015

Found, mended bed sheet, laced over wooden support8” x 10 ‘ x 1.75”2015

Andrea Vander Kooij is a fibre and performance artist who holds an MFA degree from Concordia University. Her practice incorporates traditional craft-based mediums such as knitting, quilting and embroidery as well as elements of performance. Her work addresses gender issues and the body as well as challenging notions of art, craft, and labour.

The Mend Collection is a small group of found, mended textiles. Worn to soft colours and mended with varying levels of skill, they evoke a dutiful domesticity, and a time when commodity was scarcer then it is now. The act of mending transforms the industrially produced sheets and blankets into unique items, allowing each of them to function metaphorically as a visual and tactile memory of the life of the user. Each item has been hand laced to fit over wooden stretchers.

BLUE FLORAL MEND

DRESS MEND

PINK BLANKET MEND

PURPLE FLORAL MEND

SMURF SHEET MEND

ANDREW MACDONALD

TOPOGRAPHIES ANGLE-HANGTOPOGRAPHIES

www.andrewmacdonald.ca

Machine knit vintage acrylic yarn180” x 102”2014

Hand woven acrylic and wool yarn19” x 45”2015

Machine knit green wool yarn14” x 68”2014

Andrew MacDonald is a graduate of The Ontario College of Art and Design, and holds a Masters of Fine Art from the University of Western Ontario. He has exhibited widely in Southern Ontario as well as in New York. In the summer of 2014 he took part in an artist residency at The Scottish Sculpture Workshop.

I try to create a dialogue between ambiguity and hybridity. The things I make and the materials I use often shift between the familiar and the uncanny. Part minimal sculpture, sometimes figurative, reflective of clothing and other materials morph into ambiguous objects and installations that reveal and conceal. Through processes of production involving textiles, my works are attempts at consolidating concepts of anxiety, humour, clothing, static objects, spatial play, memory and time.

My studio practice involves the production of machine-knit and hand woven textiles. I hang, twist, stretch, layer, felt and bind these handmade textiles. Found, ready-made knit clothing and various other kinds of found textiles are also used in my work, further exploring a physicality of textiles.

My hand woven works are often wall based and more physically relational, being handmade, emphasizing materiality, colour and pattern. There are elements of Bauhaus inspired design and modernist painting integrated into the hand woven works, combining a history of high art and craft. My object-based works, which utilize plastic and wood under-structures covered by machine-knit textiles, shift between figuration and abstraction. In some cases they play with forms of traditional and historic sculpture and craft. I also forgo internal structures like wood and plastic, allowing the machine-knit textiles to display their material properties.

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ANDREW MCPHAIL

GHOST

www.andrewmcphail.com

Sequins, thread, coffee, tears on used bed sheet.104” x 104” 2015

Andrew McPhail is a Canadian artist based in Hamilton, Ontario. His craft and text based work configures ephemeral materials such as band aids, Kleenex, disposable gloves and other textile related items into installations and performance based gestures that seek to describe the fragility, pathos and humour of our existence, often referencing his experiences as a person living with HIV.

Ghost is a seven by seven foot piece of bed linen, with the word GHOST hand embroidered in white and clear sequins in its center. Or more precisely, the negative space around the word GHOST is embellished with sequins. Alluding to the death bed and the winding-sheet, and through the sequins’ material association with fashion and glamour, GHOST seeks to conjure the tragic atmosphere surrounding the premature deaths of gay men from AIDS since the 1980’s, as well as the strange twilight those of us who survive, occupy.

ANU RAINA

CHAPTER 2, PAGE 1

www.anuraina.com

Mylar, embroidery punch cards, embroidery threads50” X 60”

Most of my inspirations come from an innate urge to give an expression to my thoughts and experiences that came with the journey of my life.

“Chapter 2, Page 1” is a tribute to the memory of my beautiful mother to whom I had to bid goodbye at the tender age of ten.

It is the first artwork in an autobiographical series of five that I am slowly working on. In creating this 50” x 60” piece of memory I have worked in many layers, visual and conceptual, by hand stitching pieces of Mylar and discarded embroidery punch cards. The artwork is silk screened and painted freehand with colors, pigments and motifs. The memory of waking up in her arms every morning is hand embroidered in background in form of a poem in French that I once wrote about her. The use of paisley motifs is a response to a special memory of going to the fabric looms with her, where she would buy fine Cashmere shawls as part of the wedding gifts for me and my sister.

She knew she had very little time.

Anu Raina is a Textile graduate from Sheridan College (2010). Her work is mostly inspired by her own life journeys. She uses different mediums such as India ink, dyes, pigments, embroidery, silk screening and digital printing to create her prints. Many of her artworks are made into Silk scarves and clothing. Her prints have been worn by many dignitaries and she been featured in several mainstream Canadian publications such as The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Sun, Elle Canada, Flare and NOW Magazine. She has also been interviewed by CBC Radio, CTV, Kevin Newman Live and Breakfast Television in Toronto.

Raina graduated in 2010 from the Crafts and Design program at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. A valedictorian of her class, she graduated with High Honours, top medal and several awards and scholarships including a residency at prestigious Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.

In 2012, Raina was nominated for Ontario Premier’s award for excellence. She has also collaborated with eBay Canada and The Law Society of Upper Canada to create collections of high end silk scarves for them.

Currently Anu Raina lives with her husband and two children in Oakville, Ontario.

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DYLAN FISH

COMMENT THREAD 0001

www.dylanfish.net

Jacquard weaving; merino wool, cotton warp18’ x 123’2013

Dylan Fish is currently pursing his MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he is exploring the idea of digital and physical communities. Comment Thread 0001 is part of a larger series of work that has been previously exhibited in Halifax and South Africa.

Comment Thread 0001 engages the topic of memory, both in how we use technology today to store, share and shape our identities through platforms like Facebook, as well as how the computer itself stores this information in a vast digital memory that was directly adopted from Joseph Marie Jacquard’s punch card loom.

ELYCIA SFA

-44.460711, -63.618275

www.elyciasfa.com

Handwoven digital print on cotton sateen 5” x 16”2015

Elycia SFA is a textile artist / designer / maker. The majority of her work revolves around themes of personal narratives, combined with memory, nostalgia, and loss, while portraying these concepts in the form of woven cloth. Weaving is her primary method of making, combined with woven inlay and stitching which allows her to draw with thread and create representational imagery within the body of the cloth.

Personal memory is an intriguing phenomenon, which helps us situate ourselves amongst the people around us. Our memories form a sense of identity that connects us to the larger world. This work explores the memories of particular landscapes, along with the inevitable distortion and decay of memory over time.

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HARNEET HEER

A SHADOW STITCHED ON I-IV 

hkheer.tumblr.com

Stitching on photo print 4” X 6”2015

Harneet Heer is a graduate of the Honours Fine Arts program at the University of Waterloo. She was born in Rexdale, Ontario to parents of Punjabi decent. Working primarily in soft sculpture and collage, she is most interested in exploring identity issues surrounding femininity, sexuality and race with her artwork.

I stitched the image by using different coloured threads to highlight different parts of the women in the picture. The stitching around the shawl emphasizes her cultural and racial identity. The yellow and white threads are used to highlight her features and represent the western cultural ideals of beauty (construction of beauty through European ideals). The images represent how often coloured women are left out in feminist thought and how often white women are considered the voice for all women. We have different struggles and our fight for equality is not just gender based.

HELENE VOSTERS

FLAG OF TEARS: LAMENT FOR THE STAINS OF A NATION

www.helenevosters.com

Embroidery on flag (a task-based participatory lament)73” x 35”2014–ongoing

An artist, activist and scholar, Helene’s work focuses on the role of public commemoration practices in constructing narratives related to militarism, nationalism and violence. In addition to Flag of Tears, Helene has performed the durational memorial meditations Impact Afghanistan War, Unravel, Haunting the Past’s Present, and Shot at Dawn throughout Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

Inaugurated in 1965, Canada’s distinctive (and distinctively friendly) Maple Leaf replaced the British Union Jack, symbolizing the birth of a new nation unstained by its colonial past. Under the reign of the Canadian Maple Leaf, a documented 1200 Aboriginal women and girls have been murdered or gone missing. For decades these murders were met with denial and indifference on the part of authorities and the general public. Today, as the result of the sustained labour of Aboriginal community activists, artists and scholars, the issue of Canada’s murdered and missing Aboriginal women and girls has been brought to the arena of public discourse and conscience. But despite growing national and international pressure, Prime Minister Harper steadfastly refuses to call for an inquiry. Flag of Tears takes its name from the Highway of Tears — an 800 kilometer stretch of Highway in Northern British Columbia where an estimated forty (mostly Aboriginal) women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered.

Part mourning ritual, and part meditation on the stains of the Canadian nation, Flag of Tears’ embroidery circles invite participants into a conscious reflection on the consequences of our forgetful narratives of Canadian nationalism through the task-based engagement with remembrance. As an act of lament and collective reckoning participants gather and sew tears — embroidering the stains of the nation onto the flag.

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JAMIE ASHFORTH

UNKNOWN I JAMIE

SUSAN UNKNOWN II

www.jamieashforth.com

Found rucksack, wooden stretcher42” X 60”2007

Trousers, wood stretcher36” X 60”2007

Poncho, wood stretcher38” X 60”2007

Camping pack, wooden stretcher12” X 24”2007

Jamie Ashforth holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montréal, Québec. She has exhibited in a number of group and solo exhibitions in Central and Eastern Canada. Jamie uses many mediums and has a current inclination towards painting, printmaking and textiles. Her work explores memory and expresses longing. She draws on the inevitability of improvisation.

GHOSTS is a gathering of evidence; a collection of disassembled and recontextualized found objects. Deconstructing these utilitarian objects exposes subtleties like stains, fading, smudges and tears — unintended marks that organically build composition and depth and embody memory. Each piece tells a story like a time-capsuled moment or a ghostly impression.

GHOSTS

JEN HAMILTON

OLIVER 3PM

www.jenhamilton.ca

Acrylic, Lace on Canvas72” x 32”2012

Acrylic, Lace on Canvas54” x 54”2012

Jen Hamilton is a painter and printmaker based in London, Ontario. She received her BFA from NSCAD University as well as her Fine Art Advanced Diploma from Fanshawe College. She has exhibited professionally in cities across Canada and her work can be found in both private and public collections.

To represent the distortion of memory over time, these paintings show falsely constructed scenes inspired from family photographs. Pattern and textiles distort these paintings while bidding to remain familiar. The use of lace distorts and the process of creation is as unstable as the false memory it represents.

Inconsistently Fixed

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JENNY ISERMAN

COMFORT/DISCOMFORT (BLOOD & ROSES)

sevengablehouseart.blogspot.com

Commercial and re-purposed fabrics, silk, metallic and upholstery threads, seed beads. Appliqued, machine and hand stitched, hand beaded.75” x 58.5”2011–2012

I am largely self-taught, combining a career in social services with quilt making, book art, printmaking and mixed media. My day job sensitized me to the wrongs of our world. My work reflects my conviction that one purpose of art is to bear witness and hope for change. This piece was originally juried into “Outside/Inside” at 2012 FiberPhiladelphia. It is one of my series of quilts and artist’s books exhibited in 2014 at the Durham (Ontario) Art Gallery.

Traditional quilts symbolize warmth, reassurance and happy memories. This is an ambiguous, subversive piece that memorializes victims of domestic homicide. It looks like a traditional “crazy quilt” but its beauty and weight belie any promised comfort. Instead it forces us to confront unpleasant realities, ensuring memory is kept alive.

JOYCE MELANDER-DAYTON

THEME & VARIATIONSGatorboard, silk, wool, cotton, glass beads70” x 44” x 7”2009

Joyce Melander-Dayton lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A graduate of Carleton College and the University of Minnesota, she has exhibited internationally and her work is held in many private and public collections.

Memory is ephemeral. It is malleable and elusive. It changes to accommodate our present. It is a story that we tell ourselves to give us meaning. It is a gift.

I started Theme and Variations on my 25th wedding anniversary trip to Scandinavia. It was a joyful time. My husband and I had beaten the odds: after 25 years we were still married and in love. We were looking to many more years together. I remember working on this piece while sitting in the lounge on a mail boat traveling north up the Norwegian coast.

Seven years have passed and my husband and I are getting a divorce. What was once unthinkable is now my reality. Yet, I am unburdened: I have the memory of making Theme and Variations and while I grieve my loss, I realize I have a new beginning.

The beauty of working with needle and thread is that it ties one to the present. Every stitch is a singular record of the moment lived. One’s senses are heightened, one is available to experience the “now” more fully. My marriage may be ending, but my memory of our best times has been made possible by the fact that I could slow down enough to appreciate them. I look at Theme and Variations and am grateful for the memories it brings me.

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JUDITH E MARTIN

RED MOONSTime Is A Material

www.judithmartin.info

Reclaimed wool blanket, wool threads Hand stitch20.5” x 142”2014

Judy Martin was born in 1951 and grew up on a large property near the northwestern Ontario town of Fort Frances. All her life Martin has studied art and in June 2012, she graduated with first class honours in the second fine art degree she has acquired through distance education.

Red Moons is made from a re-constructed hundred-year old wool blanket. That this cloth holds time and memory is evident in the several threadbare areas. These worn places evoke the man, woman, or child who lay with the blanket and repeatedly pulled it up as a covering. I have darned some of the more worn areas and strengthened the edges with blanket-stitched red wool. This recent handwork adds another layer of human touch.

LESLIE PUTNAM

I KEEP TRYING TO TELL YOU

www.leslieputnam.com

Installation – fibre/sound pieceFelted wool, beeswax, spices, audio component2014–ongoing

As city dwellers, the natural world calls to us from memory, both inherent and experienced. I keep trying to tell you exists to remind us of this.

Leslie Putnam earned her BFA from Concordia University in Québec, with a major in Studio Art, and BEd from Western University in Ontario. Putnam’s CV includes exhibitions in France, Portugal and Luxembourg, where she lived and worked from her studio at the publicly supported Schleiffmillen. In Ontario, she works as both a visual arts educator and artist. Her multidisciplinary practice ranges from explorations using sound within sculptural pieces, public art work, and miniature to large installation works made from natural materials. In 2011, she and her partner David Bobier were awarded the public art call for the Tolpuddle Martyr’s Monument, in London, Ontario. In 2010 she and David Bobier formed the o’honey collective.

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LHEILA PALUMBO

FRAGMENTED 1 FRAGMENTED 2Hand woven with cotton yarn and wood on a digital jacquard loom36” x 30”2015

Hand woven with cotton yarn and wood on a digital jacquard loom48” x 46”2015

Originally from Toronto, Lheila Palumbo is a textile artist and designer living in Montréal. Before entering the field of textiles, she spent several years studying architecture and French literature. She currently teaches courses in advanced weaving, Jacquard weaving, and digital embroidery at the Montréal Centre for Contemporary Textiles.

Mandelbrot’s mapping of fractals and their visual appeal, as well as museum artefacts documenting ancient sea and land travel, were my incongruous yet strangely linked starting points.

Using structural patterns created from a set number of variables, I wanted to weave imagery that would depict pattern and variation, while suggesting fragmented memories of places travelled or imagined.

LIBS ELLIOTT + JOSHUA DAVIS

TRIANGLESEX v1.0

www.libselliott.com / www.joshuadavis.com

Cotton67” x 67”2012

Elizabeth (Libs) Elliott is a textile artist and designer based in Toronto, Canada. Since 2012, she has been exploring the intersection of technology and traditional craft by using generative design to build handmade quilts. A deep appreciation for craftsmanship, design history and future-focused applications are all reflected in her work. Her commissions include work for individuals and corporate clients such as Playground Inc. She has exhibited her projects and done speaking engagements internationally, and has been covered by press such as Gizmodo.com and The Creators Project.

Since 1995, Joshua Davis, an American designer, technologist, author and artist in new media, has made a career as an image-maker using programming. He writes his own code to produce interactions with users and to generate visual compositions according to rule-based, randomized processes. His work has been inducted into the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum National Design Triennial 2006 ‘Design Life Now’, and has work in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

TriangleSex v1.0 is the first quilt in history that was designed using a computer language called Processing. This quilt is a permanent physical record of a unique digital iteration that was randomly generated by code and a historic moment that can never be repeated. Its presence conveys a balance between computer memory and a moment in time created by hand.

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LISE MELHORN-BOE

HAPPY MEMORIES

The RE BooksPOST SHOCK TREATMENT

www.lisemelhornboe.ca

Fabric book17” X 11” X 6” (closed), 5’ X 27” (hanging)2015

Fabric book16” X 10” X 4” (closed), 5.5’ X 2’ (hanging)2015

Lise Melhorn-Boe has been making funny, feminist artist’s books for almost forty years, using a light-hearted visual aesthetic to address personal and political issues affecting women’s and children’s lives and the environment. Her books are often sculptural — the visual object tells a story of its own.

RE used as a prefix has many meanings. It can indicate doing something again, sometimes with the implication of doing it better, or in a different manner, or, it can mean turning around or back. Playing off the dictum, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” these three-word books, made mostly from used fabrics or remnants, are short stories on the themes of memory and memory loss.

LUKUS TOANE

RELATIVELY

luketoane.tumblr.com

Wood frame and stretched raw canvas with individually picked threads20” x 72-65”ea

Lukus Toane has lived in Toronto for two years and currently works as the Gladstone Hotel’s Exhibitions Coordinator. He has previously travelled and worked in art gallery facilitation in places such as Wrocław, Poland and Sydney, Australia. Having roots in Northern Alberta, Toane received his education from Alberta College of Art & Design (ACAD) majoring in painting with emphasis on portraiture. He continues to explore the idea of art as object and its relativity to the people who live around it.

The body of work is about presence/absence, analysis of the art object as it is relative to a subjective viewer. I convey these motifs by picking individual threads from the weft out of factory grade raw canvas to reveal the warp. Reminiscent of the general size of an adult human, the work considers the idea of a universal portrait. Minimalist but tedious labour is reflective of a love of labour; repetitive tactility and ‘un-making’ as meditation.

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MARY KROETSCH

PILL BOX HATS

www.mary-kroetsch-textile-mixedmedia-artist.com

Soft sculpture comprising photography, printmaking, embroidery, millinery8” x 8” x 5” ea

Self-taught, I have attended classes at New Brunswick Arts and Crafts College, George Brown College and the Stratford Festival of the Arts. I have obtained Certification in Textile Surface Design from the Haliburton School of the Arts.

My works are in private and public collections including St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, the Ilkley Museum in Yorkshire, England and the CAMAC Centre for Art and Technology in France.

This installation uses the crowns of slightly oversized pill box hats to remember ladies in the varying styles of hats found in vintage photographs circa 1940. My hybrid art includes digitally enhanced photographs, printed on fabric with archival inks and hand embroidered with a free-style straight stitch, to give my subjects a new, contemporary soul. And these souls need a place to be seen, so sometimes I look to historical fashion trends to find an appropriate substrate to frame my textile portraiture.

MICHELLE FORSYTH

YELLOW ON YELLOW (VERSION 2)

BRIGHT STACK WITH PINK (VERSION 1)

www.michelleforsyth.com

Photographic print on canvas with gouache and fabric tape 30” x 30”2015

Photographic print on canvas with gouache and fabric tape30” x 30” 2014

Toronto-based artist and OCAD professor Michelle Forsyth holds an MFA from Rutgers University and a BFA from the University of Victoria. She has had exhibitions in New York, Lisbon, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas in addition to Toronto. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and Artist Trust.

This work includes hand-painted and digitally altered photographs of carefully arranged objects including: paintings built as horizontal pedestals, hand-woven copies of my husband’s shirts, crumpled paper painted to resemble cloth, dresses from my closet, and hand-painted backdrops. They are accompanied by footnotes outlining the personal significance of each item depicted.

GREY AND RED STACK 1 (VERSION 1)Photographic print on canvas with gouache and fabric tape30” x 30” 2015

Footnotes

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NICKOLAS LASCOT

DOPPELGÄNGER

GIFT HORSE

CAST YOUR PEARLS

www.nicklascot.com

Fabric, cardboard, paper, starch, black sealant, armature36” x 19” x 36”2015

cardboard, paper, starch, black sealant, armature21” x 24” x 25”2014

Fabric, starch, black sealant, armature22” x 26” x 28”2014

Originally from Denver, Colorado, Nick Lascot has been teaching and creating art in Toronto since he arrived from Brooklyn in 2011. Nick received a BFA from The School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Hunter College, and has participated in numerous exhibitions throughout New York City.

Working primarily with fabric, paper, and cardboard, I develop processes that exploit the affordances and limitations of media to create objects that explore themes of the absurd, grotesque, and uncanny. These objects press against the sticky, black film that coats our memories, grimacing through their restraints, seeking a connection.

PAULA JOHN

I DON’T KNOW WHY THIS HAPPENED, BUT IT DID.

www.paulajohn.ca

Hand-stitched quilt, silkscreen on cotton, flannel, embroidery, plastic quilted letters, pill capsules46” x 50”2011

Paula John is a multi-disciplinary artist and scholar based in Toronto. She has been exhibiting her work (including photography, film, painting, printmaking, textiles, installation, and performance) since 2003. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Documentary Media from Ryerson University, and a Master of Arts degree in Communication and Culture from York University. Some of the themes explored in her work include, gender, sexuality, feminism, and performance. Paula is currently working towards a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University.

I DON’T KNOW WHY THIS HAPPENED, BUT IT DID. is an autobiographical project exploring the experience of mental illness. It deals with a period of my life that began when, at age fifteen, I suffered a major mental breakdown and was subsequently diagnosed with severe clinical depression.

The piece is a handmade quilt, pieced together from silk-screened documents from my psychiatric file. Quilts are distinctly feminine art forms that are a part of a long history of women’s artistic expression. A quilt is also something comforting that you wrap around yourself to keep warm, and for me the evidence contained in my medical records is validating and comforting. They are a record in black and white, the primary documents of what I went through that say, “this happened”. The goal of this work is to translate a devastating experience into a cathartic one through the process of art making; to make sense of what happened to me, and ultimately come to peace with it. In a larger sense, the goal of this piece is to contribute to the discourse surrounding mental illness and to transform my own life experience into an aesthetic experience for the viewer.

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REBECCA SIEMERING

ICARUS

www.rebeccasiemering.com

Found lottery tickets, dental floss, cotton5’ x 5’ x 1”2013

Rebecca Siemering was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1974, and lives and works in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and is a fiber artist, arts administrator and curator. For the majority of her career, she has explored the theme of “wanting the good life,” utilizing found materials. Currently she is producing sculptures and textile art for her “Lottery Project” by taking a daily walk in the neighbourhood and picking up thrown away scratch tickets. From her findings she creates animistic textile pieces and tapestries. Her methodical, yet compulsive style of stitch and needlework reflects the original obsession — to rise above the mundane, the sculpture embodying a soul that exists apart from the corporeal article of ink and pulp.

I have always loved paper, and started to find scratch tickets on a daily walk home from work. I began to think about the dreams in the moment of scratching the image away, the hopes, the desires. It made a hopeful noise. How sad it must have been to lose. Chuck it. Onto regular life again. I thought, let’s make something better with this mound of paper, shake all of the bad luck away. The work reflects creating an armor of dreamlike better world, and trying to rise above it. I would like to collect Canadian lottery tickets if possible.

MIDAS TOUCHFound lottery tickets, Powerball tickets, dental floss, cotton gold lamé, Hungarian glass beads3.5’ x 15” x 15”2012

RAINMAKERFound lottery tickets and Pocket Slot tickets, dental floss, betting sheets, wooden handle15” x 18” x 4”2015

Re(find) Clothing

ROB SHOSTAK

HOMESPUN YARN: HAMPSTEAD

rodasho.com

Sheep’s wool yarn, oak48” x 84”, 16” x 27” (separate), 80” x 84” (together)1:2000 scale2015

Rob Shostak is a Toronto-based designer whose practice crosses many disciplines. From high rise buildings, to product design, graphic work and cartography, the cross-pollination between each project creates new problem solving strategies and ideas. Born in Montréal, he has also lived in Vancouver and Los Angeles. Rob has travelled extensively, but is most proud of having visited every province in Canada by car over the course of three months. In the summer he rides a bike with a planter on the back [#O2Wheels]. On Sundays during the winter you can find him curling.

Homespun Yarn: Hampstead consists of a mapping of my childhood neighbourhood in Montréal created using a woven network of yarn. Much of my childhood was spent in multiple homes with my tightly knit and large extended family. The piece explores the central presence and influence my parents, grandparents, and extended family had on my nascent identity. The delicate street/string lattice serves as the only hint to orientation and place. As a child, these traces would be incomprehensible. Now, however, these spatial memories are tainted by the primacy of cartography in our everyday lives.

Since my leaving Montréal, two of the homes have been sold, as my grandparents have all passed away. The location of their homes are signified by a fraying in the weaving, recalling the traditional Jewish practice of tearing a garment during the mourning period. Other significant homes are indicated as they remain a part of the generational cycle of our broader family unit as my nieces, nephews and second-cousins create their own memories.

The smaller piece is the area around the cemetery where three of my grandparents are buried. It is a Jewish custom to leave a stone as a marker of one’s visit to a grave: their eternal home.

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THE ART I S TS HAVE CH E C K E D IN .

SAM PEDICELLI

COMPENSATION 1: DIGITALDONKEY

CHILDRENS’ DRAWING

COMPENSATION 1: BETAFISH

www.sampedicelli.com

Acrylic paint and beads on linen // inkjet print8.5” X 11” ea (diptych)

Acrylic paint and beads on canvas11” X 17”

Acrylic paint and beads on fabric // inkjet print6” X 8” ea (triptych)

A Toronto-based artist working in contemporary painting and beadwork. Primarily concerned with the evolution of modern communication and the forms through which it occurs, Sam utilizes traditional modes of fine art and craft in a meticulous consideration of the post-human condition. Sam Pedicelli currently resides in Toronto and is working towards finishing her undergraduate thesis at OCAD University.

Digitization is a natural progression for citizens of contemporary culture, the technological age giving life to the first generation of cyber-natives. These works closely examine the idea of memory and childhood in modern society, drawing specifically upon first-hand experience of growing up among the latest household technologies. These images derive their composition and colour scheme from the imagery of my own childhood drawings.

Digital Natives

WWW.GLADSTONEHOTEL.COM