Here is a collaborative drawing that me and my friend, Aislin did in response to the drawing games that we were shown in class:

The Handmade & The Homemade II

This Tuesday we had a class discussion about the articles "Oh Canada" and "Builders", which we had read and written responses on. Since I already did a response to the readings, I sort of feel like I don't have much more to say about that class. I do, however, have more to say about handmade art (surprise!). In my last blog post I talked about the whole movement of hand-making in general, and what I thought of it, but I didn't really get the chance to respond to the art and artists we had looked at in class that day, so I'll do that now. With Germaine Koh's Knitwork, like Professor Kelly said the sweaters that she is unraveling and re-knitting each represent a presumably unique person,
each has it's own stories. At the same time Koh bought the sweaters second hand, and didn't wash them gives her project an "ick factor". To me this is a great example of the messy intimacy that in habits a lot of handmade items and art. It's like the same feeling you get from sharing a drink with your best friend, almost--like, if you think about it on a molecular level too much it's gross, but the intimacy about it makes it special, so the "ick factor" of both things gives them more value, in a way. Maybe this is a weird thing to say, and no one else feels this way, maybe I look like a weirdo now.
Anyway, moving on... I thought Janice Wright Cheney's Widow was one of the most beautiful pieces of art I've seen. I had never thought about the fact that taxidermy could be used in art--probably partially because I don't like the idea of killing an animal just for decoration, which I know is not what all taxidermy is. I'm not sure where she got the bear, but what she did with it was beautiful--she took something dead and made it a thing of beauty. I'm really bad at articulating this but I just really loved it.
I also really liked Eryn Foster's Walking Laundry Line. I actually kind of have this thing for clotheslines. I just think they're one of the most beautiful things to be found in urban spaces. I like the fact that we have dryers now, but some
people still take their wet laundry outdoors, and hang it individually on a line, and led the wind dry it. I love seeing all the colourful garments dancing in the breeze, and looking at the clothing up close, speculating about which of them belongs to what member of the family, and what kind of person they are. This probably also makes me sound like a freak.
Anyway, those were just some of the pieces we looked at that I particularly liked.

The Handmade & The Homemade

so excited about the handmade and homemade art movement. I'm so excited that I'm concerned about writing a coherent blog entry about it. I feel like I've experienced a lot of it first hand already in some ways because there's a lot of hand-making going on in Sackville, and people seem to take a lot of pride in those aspects of time and labour in their work, even if they might not call it art or put it in an art context. I'm thinking of knitted garments, socks turned into cozies for mason jars carrying tea, embroidery and felting, zine-making and book-making, and the re-purposing of items broken or otherwise, including the alteration, mending and even making of clothing. I think the only thing I've made that I might classify as handmade art is something I call my Scarf of Life. I started it in grade 11 or 12 I think and I just worked on it whenever I felt like it, using mostly incomplete or leftover amounts of yarn, and the rule was that I had to keep knitting no matter what happened to mess it up—if I dropped a stitch or there was a crazy knot I couldn't unravel anything, I had to just keep going, which is why it was called the scarf of life—because that's what life is like. I experimented a lot with different knitting patterns on the scarf as well; it was were I first tried ribbing, and using two strands of yarn at once. I changed yarn whenever I ran out or got tired of one colour.

There is an intimacy and humanity with handmade art that is not always there (or is not always meant to be there) with other kinds of art, and for me that contributes a lot to it's beauty and my experience of it. I adore the community aspect of it—I think that's one of the most beautiful things about it. I mean, art can often be so alienating, and many times it has to be because it is meant as a challenge. Handmade art, I feel, refuses to alienate its audience by way of challenging their isolation—challenging the sterile culture of earphones in ears and quickly typed messages and technology coming out of our yingyang, and everything having to be fast and easy. Encountering handmade anything, and handmade art even moreso is like being on a cold bus after a day of not interacting much with anyone, and having an elderly lady sit down next to you, touch you warmly on the shoulder and start asking about your life. 

"Field Trip" to The Owens

This Thursday our Canadian Art class took place in the lobby of the Owens Art Gallery where we discussed each of the pieces that hung there. I would have to say that my absolute favourite work in the lobby that day was Christopher Pratt's “The Suburbs Standing West”, and I know I wasn't alone. The first time I walked into the Owen's after the painting was hung, I was immediately drawn to it. We looked at the work in class, projected on a screen a few months ago, but the experience of seeing it in person, up close was a lot different, and far more striking. I was actually so compelled by it that when my parent drove me back after the Easter weekend I made them come in and take a look at it (luckily the Owens was open—I didn't think it would be). They were pretty taken with it too. The painting looks like you could just walk through the frame and onto the winter suburban street. When I look at it, Suburbs Standing West transports me onto a lonely winter walk, which is beautiful an bleak at the same time. While I feel isolated though, I also feel like I finally have the space and time to think, and no one is watching me—I have no social context. This is just my experience of the painting.

Although I would have say that Suburbs Standing West is my favourite work in the lobby, I also really enjoyed seeing Joyce Weiland's O Canada print up close, especially after having read so much about her for my essay. I feel like nationalism is always in the form of this collective...mass; although nationalism wouldn't be a thing if it wasn't felt by individuals, it always seems to take the form of a collective attitude, and countries are so large that it becomes impersonal. But with O Canada, we see a nationalism that isn't only individual, but highly intimate. Weiland takes something as large and sweeping as the Canadian national anthem and turns it into an intimate moment of love and affection with the print of her own lips on paper. I can't think of any time I've seen nationalism in such a way before.

Erik Edson and Our Representations of Nature

I'm so excited, because after attending Erik Edson's artist's talk I actually have something to say in this blog that relates art to my other minor (philosophy), rather than my major (literature). First, I just want to say though that I was really impressed with his use of space in the installations that he showed us. From what I understand it's vary challenging to work in 3D (I've barely tried it, and when I have it hasn't been simple), but Erik Edson made really interesting use of space for all his installations; if I had the money, I would buy a house to live in and ask if I could pay him to "decorate" it's interior. Also, I thought it was so so cool how he used sound in his installations, especially in the piece, Burrow; it was so neat how he had the urban sounds of the parking garage coming out through the burrow, live as they were being made, and without anyone knowing they were being recorded. I feel like I use words like "neat" and "cool" way too much in these blogs, especially for an English major, but I digress, I thought his use of sound recording in Burrow was truly innovative (how's that for an adjective?).
What I mainly want to discuss here though, is Erik Edson's examination of our representations of nature. It really reminded me of an article we read in Feminist Philosophy about meat-eating and anti-vegetarianism and how it relates to sexism and racism; to be honest, it reminds me of a lot of feminist theory, actually. Edson used images of animals and nature that came from textbooks, and pre-made models of animals, and he said at the end of the talk that these are "learned representations"  and that they are our "interpretations" of nature, which is totally true. A lot of feminist theory, especially as it intersects with anti-racist thought, points out the importance of recognizing that often the pervading ideas about non-dominant groups (such as animals, women, and people of colour) are just that--the interpretation of those groups by the dominant group. Society has often (and is still does) take this interpretation to be fact, or objective observation, simply because it comes from the dominant group, hence the entry of these ideas into places like textbooks, such as the ones that Edson uses in his art. Those are our--the dominant group's--interpretations of the natural world, and though we might like to think of them as objective fact, they are only our subject representations.

Work Cited

 Bailey, Cathryn. "We Are What We Eat: Feminist Vegitarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity." Hypatia 22.2 (2007): 39-59. Print.

Reactions to the Work of Jana Sterback and Valerie Blass

The two artists whose work struck me most in Tuesday's class were Jana Sterbak and Valerie Blass. It was only after further investigation that I realized how similar their work actually is--obviously the two artists are quite different, but their art seems to me to be doing some of the same things. What I believe struck me most initially with both of these artists was how jarring and strange the content of their work was (something I often find appealing), and the palpable physical presence of their work. Instillation art automatically has more of a literally physical presence in general, but I feel when I look at the work of both Sterbak and Blass that to be walking through a gallery by yourself and to come upon a piece of work by either of them would be similar in a lot of ways to walking through a gallery alone and suddenly coming upon another person. The most obvious way in which this effect is accomplished is that both Blass and Sterbak's work frequently takes the form life sized figures or bodies, but it seems like there would also be a life-like quality to them that may bot be present in all life-sized figures. Similarely, both Blass and Sterbak seem to be working with aspects of embodiment, especially with Sterbak and frequently with Blass these seem to be themes of female embodiment and femininity.