Toronto Craft Alert

Review by Tara Bursey

It’s A Big Deal!
Harbourfront Centre
January 23- April 4 2010

Curated by Melanie Egan, Head of Craft and
Patrick Macaulay, Head of Visual Arts

“How big is big?  What is big?  Is it big enough?”  These are the questions Melanie Egan and Patrick Macaulay ask of both exhibiting artists and viewers in their curatorial statement for It’s A Big Deal!, currently showing at Harbourfront Centre.  This exhibition focuses on new work by selected residents of Harbourfront’s Artist-In-Residence program.

Egan and Macaulay’s questions touch on a concern shared by most artists at one point or another—what constitutes a “big” idea?  What makes some ideas bigger or better than other ideas?  When is an idea “big” enough to pursue?  The sense of creative paralysis that comes from being fearful that an idea isn’t “big” enough can be as defeatist as the feeling that an idea or concern is simply too vast to tackle.  This process of weighing one’s ideas is an important part of most art and craft practices, and something that artists at all stages of development engage in.

In It’s A Big Deal!, emerging craft-based artists play with both big (and small) work and big (and humble) ideas in a variety of ways, from near life-size simulations of intimate spaces to monuments in miniature.  Some of the exhibitors contributed experimental work on a grand scale or in multiple, which often resulted in objects that were unusual, evocative blends of organic and synthetic.

One example of such work is Niko Dimitrijevic’s Just One Wish… Huge, glass ladybugs arranged in an orderly cluster play with the geometric shapes ladybugs are comprised of.  In multiples, the bugs become kaleidoscopic, and generate a repeating pattern of lines and dots.  The presence of one lone albino ladybug breaks the pattern, reminding us that nature can never be as perfect or exact as a geometric formula.

Joanna Schmidt’s clay work, Untitled, evoke industrial materials such as scrap metal and construction fencing.  Ambiguous and fragile-looking, the two sculptures sit at an in-between height that makes them feel like studies for much larger sculptural works.

Less mysterious, but equally engaging were Margaret Lim’s contributions to the exhibition, Facets– a series of sterling silver rings.  Each ring features a rendering of a large gemstone, which, in Lim’s words, outlines “the facets, line and proportions associated with cutting the stone.”  Through the use of line, the structure of each gemstone—and the conspicuous absence of it—is highlighted to make a quietly subversive comment on the nature of value and the fetish-object.

Both Shuyu Lu and Amanda McCavour’s work use detailed representations of space in thread to address notions of home.  Lu embroiders familiar scenes from around downtown Toronto—parks, Kensington Market—onto layers of silk organza displayed on multiple embroidery hoops of all sizes.  These scenes are very cinematic, and each embroidered piece’s level of completion parallels the effect of how our peripheral vision takes in flashes of the streetscape when we are (as Torontonians, perpetually!) on the go.

Amanda McCavour was one of the few exhibiting artists who actually contributed a single large piece to the exhibition, as opposed to a number of multiple components that when spread out, cover a large area space.  Like Lu, McCavour is interested in home and identity, but instead has chosen to depict what looks like the interior of a rural home as opposed to a bustling urban street.  As with her previous work made entirely with thread, McCavour’s sense of detail is amazing, from the pattern of the wallpaper to a single electrical outlet subtly placed on the outside edge of the installation.  Stand-In For Home conveys how our recollection of environments from the past exist as tangled combinations of reality, romanticisization and loss.

Participating Artists:
Micah Adams
Alisha Marie Boyd
Norah Deacon
Niko Dimitrijevic
Margaret Lim
Shuyu Lu
Amanda McCavour
Adriana McNeely
Rose-Angeli Ringor
Johanna Schmidt
Patrycja Zwierzynska

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Tara Bursey is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture and installation, drawing, performance and craft.  In the past three years, she has exhibited extensively in a diverse range of venues, from window installations and telephone poles to the Textile Museum of Canada and the Ontario Crafts Council Gallery, as well as in group shows in Halifax, Edmonton and Copenhagen.  Tara’s most recent projects include organizing and curating The Portable Library Project and working as one-third of the Toronto Zine Library Collective.  She also makes zines, blogs, does album and poster art for her deadbeat friends in punk bands, and is currently teaching a man incarcerated in Angola, Louisiana how to draw through the mail.