Heir/Looms

Here is a sneak preview of an exhibition I'll be taking part in next month in Montreal. Thanks to Nicole Dawkins for including me!

More info on Heir/Looms to come soon.

www.heirloomsexhibit.tumblr.com

Moon Man Newfie

Here are some cell phone photos of me and my souvenir pillow-in-progress made at a workshop this afternoon at the Textile Museum of Canada. The workshop was held today by Andrew Hunter of the collaborative art duo, Dodolab. This pillow is inspired by the province of my forefathers and mothers (Newfoundland!) as well as the Stompin' Tom song, "Moon Man Newfie" and various NFLD culinary oddities. This weekend's workshops are a part of the TMC's newest exhibition, Cold Comfort: New and Improved Souvenirs of Canada. It's amazing-- go check it out!

Photos: Andrew Hunter

Catching Up

I am very behind on this blog! My only excuse is that I'm one month into a summer job that requires me to spend a very long time on a computer-- something far from the retail reality I was so used to one short month ago. By the time I get home, I would rather not type another word! There is plenty to catch up on, but for this post I'll just concentrate on the two (wonderful and super noteworthy) shows I have work in right now.

The above photograph is of my corner of a little world known as The Wunderkabinet-- a roving series of exhibitions in Kreuzberg, Berlin curated by the talented Leah Buckareff. This is my third Wunderkabinet exhibition, and in some ways the premise of this third exhibition-- The Reading Raum-- is the one that is closest to my heart. Housed in a wacky architectural storage unit called The Turtle in the Etsy Labs Berlin space, The Reading Raum is an archive and exhibition of mini-books, zines and printed matter. Much like a zine library, people are encouraged to peruse the books and linger, and they even have the option to purchase many of the items on display. I loaned a heap of work to the show and if the photographs of the opening on Leah's Flickr page are any indication, it looks like the show was very well recieved when it opened. Congrats Leah, and thanks again for including me!



Secondly, I am one of the 49 artists included in Paradise Lost-- the very last exhibition at Fly Gallery, a long-running and much loved window gallery on Queen Street West. The following is text from the press release put out by Tanya Read and Scott Carruthers, proprietors of Fly Gallery:

After 12 years Fly Gallery is packing it in. Our mandate has been to keep art accessible and contribute to the cultural life of the street. Since 1999 the development of this stretch of Queen St. has changed the dynamic of that culture. One may call this development ‘Gentrification’. Often associated with negative connotations it is a reality of many urban neighbourhoods. Whether the development is a good or bad thing, it is a factor in why Fly is leaving Queen West. Is this Paradise Lost or a new beginning? The spirit of Fly will live on and we have invited artists to say goodbye with us.

I had my very first art show at Fly Gallery in 2005, and I ended up showing there twice more in 2006 and 2008. Fly was instrumental in bringing art to the Queen Street strip and providing people with spontaneous and often playful encounters with art in their daily lives. It was immeasurably valuable as a truly accessible art gallery-- a rare breed in this day and age. I'll miss it dearly! Happy trails, Tanya and Scott!



This is a photo of my piece for Paradise Lost while it was in progress. "The poor are shunned even by their neighbours, but the rich have many friends" is a proverb from the Old Testament. I chose it because I felt like it succinctly summed up my view of what has been happening on Queen West for the past five or six years. While the tone of this proverb may seem a little snippy, I admire Tanya and Scott for taking the opportunity to move forward and start anew.

Paradise Lost is up at Fly Gallery-- 1172 Queen Street West-- until August 13, 2011.

Photo Credit (Top): Ina Gollmann

Beer-broidery

So far so good! I still have lots to do, though. It has to be done by June 18th.

Sandwich Board

The beginnings of what will be a pretty intense cross-stitch project. This piece will (hopefully, if it turns out well!) end up in Toronto window gallery institution Fly Gallery's very last show, Paradise Lost, which will run from late June until the end of July.

More on this project as it starts to take shape.

School Jerks EP on Art 4 Punks Blog

Not much to report these days-- is it possible that I'm experiencing the dog days of summer in May? I've felt oddly bored and paralyzed lately, as though I've been hit by some form of post-school narcosis.

A few weeks ago the School Jerks EP got a nice mention on a blog that I follow out of LA called Art 4 Punks. Thanks for the props, Paul! Take a look at A4P for a peek at some of the more interesting examples of punk and hardcore record art from this side of 1981.

Here is a funny peek at the process of making the record covers. Ben spent two nights hand stamping 1000 covers in our living room as I (for the most part) watched on in amusement/amazement. While part of me isn't as happy with the overall result of this record over the previous one, it's still pretty awesome and there's been some nice feedback about it.

B'More or Bust

It's official. I'm relocating to Baltimore for 4 months in September to attend MICA. Land of crab cakes and Hairspray. Holy crap!

Three Towers

These are three pin designs I drew two days ago for my pals, the Modern Superstitions. Text will be added which will also be hand-drawn, and it looks like we'll only be using the bottom two after all-- the water tower and the hydro tower.

Modern Superstitions are the easiest band to do artwork for-- it is always a huge pleasure. The main reason for this is that both their lyrics and music are so damn evocative. The idea of bell towers and clock towers immediately came to mind when I first listened to the songs on their last EP. We ended up going with a stained glass motif as a slight variation on those ideas, but I was able to work with towers in this pin project, which I'm grateful for. These towers are definitely less majestic and more mundane and "local" feeling, which matches some of their songs and lyrics this time around-- Hometown, Loveless Town, etc.

The hydro tower is an ode to my own hometown, Scarborough (incidentally, also a loveless town!). The water tower is an icon associated with more rural hometowns. The idea is that the hydro tower pin be silver, and the water tower be a bronzy gold...we'll see if everything works out as planned!

Sweetie Pie Press Tour Fundraiser

Only three days to go. Take a look at this video, get inspired by Becky's amazing life and activities, and DONATE.

All the details can be found on Becky's Kickstarter page.

Easter Eggs

Dyed some easter eggs today using wax. These are some of my favourites.

Mushroom and Butterfly

This was my final project for a sculpture class this year. Would you believe the course was called Nature, Transformation and Change? Leave it to OCAD to infuse a course about nature with computer processes and trends in technology. Even though I don't "feel like myself" having done this project-- some of these ideas felt like a bit of a stretch for me-- I did enjoy the process, and have been meaning to work with sound for a while. I realize reading about this project won't be everyone's cup of tea, but read on if you feel so inclined.

Mushroom and Butterfly

Mushroom and Butterfly is an artistic experiment centred around two audio recordings and their corresponding audio waveforms. The name of the project comes from the two forms popped corn can take, the butterfly and the mushroom. This project is an extension of my last project, which used popcorn kernels as raw material for a public art intervention that explored genetically modified organisms and the corporate mediation of our collective experiences of food.

This project was also inspired by recent research I conducted for completely different projects. After researching the work of contemporary artist and experimenter Natalie Jeremijenko, I became interested in her projects that explore unlikely forms of data visualization such as tree growth and digital printer viruses. In writing a completely different paper on a Canadian abstract painter from the 1930s named Bertram Brooker, I became interested in a condition he experienced called synesthesia-- a neurological condition where one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to an involuntary secondary sense or cognitive pathway. In other words, synesthesia involves an inexplicable intersection of two or more senses. For example, some people who experience synesthesia might associate certain numbers with certain colours, or identify certain letters as either masculine or feminine. Bearing this in mind, I was interested in how senses can be combined to conduct investigations guided by intuition. For this project in particular, I used both sound and data visualization in an attempt to examine the inherent differences between genetically modified corn kernels and organic corn kernels.

Natalie Jeremijenko-- one source of inspiration for this project-- is a contemporary artist who has worked extensively with nature, and has explored both analog and digital forms of data visualization. In her project Onetrees (1998-2003), Jeremijenko planted one thousand clone trees across the San Francisco Bay Area. While these trees are genetically identical, their growth and development over time serves as an indicator of the social and environmental differences of each site they were placed in. This project, as such, could be thought of an unconventional method of data visualization. The projects A-Trees and Stump are computer art works related to the greater Onetrees project. A-Trees are virtual trees that allow people to monitor the growth of a virtual tree on the desktop of their personal computer. The A-Trees software includes a real-time carbon dioxide sensor, causing the virtual tree to either thrive or suffer according to the amount of CO2 in the immediate vicinity of the computer. Similarily, Stump acts as a re-imagining of more conventional forms of data visualization, giving form to what the Onetrees website refers to as “tree debt." According to the website:

(Stump is a) printer queue virus that counts the number of pages consumed by the printer. When the equivalent of a tree in pulp has been consumed the program automatically prints out a slice of tree. Accumulating these pieces of paper ‘grows’ a stump of the forest that you and your printer have consumed, and a tangible representation of tree debt."

For my own project Mushroom and Butterfly, I was interested in exploring the inherent differences between GM and organic popcorn kernels, and whether or not the two types of kernels would “behave” differently when popped. I have very little experience using technological or computer-based processes in my work, and decided to use audio recording both because I have a working knowledge of some recording software, but also because audio recording seemed like a somewhat nonsensical and very unlikely lens with which to envision the properties of genetically modified and organic foods. My process entailed my positioning my laptop next to my stovetop. I recorded the popping sounds of both the GM and organic popcorn using the Mac recording program GarageBand, starting and stopping the recording from the first popped kernel to the point when the kernels finally finished popping. The results of the recording were two audio recordings, and the accompanying audio waveforms. While the recordings could be considered pieces of readymade sound art in themselves, the audio waveforms act as a form of visual data that clearly illustrates the differences between the behavior of both bags of popcorn. For example, the organic corn waveform reveals that it finished popping faster overall, and the quality of it’s popping reads on the waveform as louder and longer clusters of multiple pops, with an irregular rhythmic quality. On the other hand, the genetically modified popcorn’s waveform is quieter, with a less vigorous yet highly surprisingly regular rhythmic quality. While such a hypothesis could never be considered truly scientific on account of subtle differences in cooking temperature, freshness and ingredients, the audio waveforms from the two recordings seem to indicate that GM popcorn behaves more regularly than organic popcorn.

While the viability of my findings through this experiment many not convince anyone that I’ve discovered anything profound about the differences between genetically modified and organic corn as evidenced through popping sounds, I do think there is value to experiments such as this one. In particular, I think there is potential for audio waveforms to serve as a method of reading and measuring information outside of the sphere of music. While this may be far from uncharted territory, I would be interested in exploring these ideas in greater depth in future projects.

Bibliography

“Onetrees: An Information Environment.” Xdesign/Natalie Jeremijenko Website. New York University. 30 March 2011

Sardar, Zahid. “Society’s Signposts: Natalie Jeremijenko’s Trees Aren’t Simply Decorative-- They Can Be Read Like a Social Register.” San Francisco Gate/sfgate.com. October 23rd, 2004. 30 March 2011

“Synesthesia.” Wikipedia. 13 April 2011

Tribe, Mark and Jana, Reena. “A-trees: Natalie Jeremijenko.” New Media Art. Edited by Uta Grosenick. Cologne, Germany: Taschen 2009. 48-9 (print)

The Thomson Collection

While it is somewhat fashionable to poo-poo the Art Gallery of Ontario's Thomson Collection-- Ken Thomson was largely responsible for funding the AGO's renovation, and his extensive collection of European and Canadian Art was donated to the gallery after his death-- after doing a fair bit of research on it for a paper, I can honestly say I am a big fan. The European Collection in particular is home to some very eccentric sculptural gems-- the sorts of things that would belong to a flamboyant uncle with black humour who travels a lot. The above images are some of my favourites. They are courtesy of the AGO's Art of the Day tumblr page.

From Top:

Rosary Pendant: Death Mask and Skull Eaten by Worms and Lizards
Northern France or Southern Netherlands
1500-1525
ivory, polychrome

Allegory of Youth and Death
German (Augsburg or Munich)
early 17th century
ivory, 7.3 x 22.6 x 9.4 cm

Death Triumphant
German (Bavaria?)
around 1670
lindenwood, 24.0 x 13.5 x 7.5 cm

Skull Pendant with Entombed Skeleton
British or Dutch
17th century
gold, enamel, diamonds, 1.4 x 1.2 x 3.4 cm

The Twilight Zone, The Uncanny Valley and Rod Serling on Creativity

I've been at home with the stomach flu for the past three days. I have a ton of work piling up around me, but all I can bring myself to do is watch episode after episode of The Twilight Zone on Youtube. I have been a fan of TZ for as long as I can remember, but I've fallen back into love with Rod Serling and TZ in a big way recently. Here is an amazing picture taken during the production (I'm guessing?) of my all-time favourite episode, The After Hours, which involves mannequins coming to life, and a hidden floor of a shopping mall. Also, the episode was shot in 1960, and the episode's lead (pictured on the left, with her mannequin double on the right) looks exactly like the first Barbie doll, that would have been released less than a year earlier in 1959.

This photo also reminds me of a theory I learned about recently called the uncanny valley. It is a robotics theory that determines at what point humans become repulsed or "creeped out" by robots that look like humans. I would say that the mannequin definitely sits in range of the uncanny valley, without making the episode remotely unwatchable.

Not entirely unrelated, here is a video of Rod Serling in the late 60s or early 70s speaking with students about writing for television, specifically about creativity and working with ideas. Everything he says could be applied to making visual art too, and it's all fine advice, even if at times it is a little "dad-like." I believe my own father said "if it wasn't hard, everyone would do it" to me at some point within the past month...!

Psychedelic Album Art

I once joked that I can tell how awesome an album is going to be based on how illegible the album's title is on it's cover. If this sounds weird, it's because most of the albums I consume are from the psychedelic era. Here are some examples of records from my collection with totally over-the-top cover art and creative (if completely unreadable) examples of typography. This post is probably inspired by my recent review of the work of Marian Bantjes, who has admitted to being influenced by the art and design of the late 60s.

From the top:
The Incredible String Band, The Five Hundred Spirits or The Layers of the Purple Onion (Elektra, 1967)
SRC, Self-titled (Capitol, 1968)
Elyse, Self-titled (Tetragrammaton, 1968)
Pisces, A Lovely Sight (Reissue on Numero Group, 2009)
The Tiffany Shade, Self-titled (Mainstream, 1968)

Marian Bantjes Review on TCA

A review I wrote of the Marian Bantjes exhibition was just posted on Toronto Craft Alert. Check it out here.

For more information on the show at Onsite (at) OCADU, check out these websites:

http://www.ocad.ca/onsite
http://iwonderbantjes.tumblr.com/

Corn Maze Performance

Last week, I did a performance at Dundas Square with popcorn kernels.  I confess, this was an assignment for the one studio class I am taking in school this year, called Special Focus Studio: Nature, Transformation and Change.  The assignment simply required that we make a piece of work that references ecological art, bio art, and uses "light, weather, animal, vegetable or mineral" as material for a work of art.  Pretty familiar territory for me, I'd say!

My idea was to continue in the vein of the last piece of work for this class-- it involved a proposal for a piece of public art using cast Iroquois longhouse/greenhouse hybrid forms as a basis for three bronze sculptures across from a cluster of highrise buildings in my old neighbourhood in Scarborough. The project was rooted in ideas about urban food insecurity.  I was also thinking about recent work I've done with cornsilk, specifically the corn maze quilt square I made for the Greenbelt Foundation Quilt Project, sponsored by the Ontario Craft Council.  This is the short write up I did about my square, for the project's catalogue:


Corn Maze is a representation of an aerial view of a corn maze made out of the corn silk of Ontario-grown corn.  Corn mazes, like berry picking, are attractions commonly linked to agritourism or “agritainment.”  As a city-dweller, my experiences of the Greenbelt growing up were limited to such forms of contact with rural life.  Similarly, as an adult my connection to rural Ontario is almost entirely limited to my consumption of locally grown produce. Corn Maze pokes fun at my unabashedly urban relationship with Ontario’s countryside.

In doing further research on corn mazes, I came across photos of a number of corn/hedge mazes that served as enormous advertisements for McDonalds, Husky and Chevrolet, meant to be seen aerially.  To me, these rather perverse advertisements served as an apt metaphor for the omnipresence of corporate interests in the realm of food, from agriculture to food retail and brand power.  Corporations mediate out experiences with food-- it is disturbing to think that such a vital, elemental part of our lives is essentially constructed and informed by corporate interests.



I knew that I wanted to make an installation in a public space that used the idea of a corn maze as it's framework.  My objective was to make make a physical manifestation of this dichotomy of food experience as natural, nourishing, visceral and personal while also highly mediated.  I also was thinking about the ideas surrounding my original Corn Maze quilt square-- in an urban environment, our experiences of food involve us purchasing it as opposed to growing it.  How might one reconcile this distance from food's original source-- the farm, the earth-- through a performative gesture? Deciding on the right site was really important to the performance. After briefly considering laying a Corn Maze out in the parking lot of the Liberty Village location of Metro (where I do most of my grocery shopping), I decided that Dundas Square would be the best site due to it's proximity to so many billboards, signs, and for the square's general sense of insane media barrage.




So, for my performance I made a corn maze-- modelled after a corn maze drawing I did with corn silk on Kozo paper just under a year ago-- on the ground.  It ended up being about 10' X 10' large.  I used a Metro reusable shopping bag to carry about 30 lbs of kernels to Dundas Square...it was insanely heavy!  Being on my hands and knees for an hour was no easy task either, but the pain was eased slightly by the fact that many passers by stopped to look and chat as I was working.  Children tidied my stray kernels as I worked and distracted hungry pigeons by feeding them breadcrumbs.  One man-- who was awesome, and helped me clean up all my kernels with a shovel when I was done-- told me about how what I was doing reminded him of his wedding in the Philippines where coconut leaves were laid out in patterns on the ground as part of the ceremony.


 
There is a little more to this piece and my research for it than I will write about here.  I did a bit of research on GMOs and the artwork of Costa Rican artist Lucia Madriz, who does artwork with staple foods such as corn, beans and rice.  I also learned about some interesting parallel practices that are related to my installation, such as Navaho and Tibetian Sand Painting, as well as the Indian practice of Kolam, which is essentially sand painting with rice powder in order to invite birds and small insects and animals into the home in order to pay tribute to the harmonious co-existence of humans and animals.  All in all, making this installation was a great experience, and it has provided me with a number of ideas for more work with corn...work that will be a little easier on the knees, at that!


More pictures of the performance can be found on my Flickr page. All photos by B. Needham.  Thanks, Bo!

School Jerks 3rd 7"

This glorious recorded artifact of the hardcore punk persuasion came out about a month ago, and the cover drawing is by yours truly. I hand-stamped the logo on about 200 of the 1000 copies that were made, too.

School Jerks' myspace can be found here.

Joni Mitchell Draws on the CBC, 1967

Joni talks negative and positive space with the hosts, and does a pretty groovy drawing. This is one of many very fun CBC RetroBites, scooped off of the CBC's Youtube channel.

Marian Bantjes

Marian Bantjes is an exceptionally talented and creative designer and typographer from British Columbia. She has an exhibition up right now at Onsite (at) OCAD, that I can't recommend enough. The exhibition is at least in part in honour of her new book, I Wonder.

For more info on Bantjes, check out her website.
For more info on her OCAD exhibition, look at this.

Shadow Box Exhibition at the TMC

I probably should have posted about this earlier, but I have a piece up in the Textile Museum of Canada's annual Shadow Box exhibition and auction right now. This is my fifth year in a row doing the event. The show us up until the night of the auction on March 3rd, so there is still a bit of time to see the work. All the work is posted online here along with all the info about the show.

Above is a photo of my rather simple piece for the show this year. It is made of garlic skin and it is called...you guessed it (or did you?)...A Breast.