G.2 Re:making : mending, materiality, and reuse in craft and design
Fri Oct 28 / 13:30 – 15:00 / East Common Room, rm 1034, Hart House
chair /
- Keith Bresnahan, OCAD University
This session invites papers that consider practices and theories of remaking, mending, and reuse in craft and design from antiquity to the present. Papers might consider practices such as visible mending, or kintsugi; intentional breaking and remaking; the incorporation of spolia or ruins into new buildings; cut-up, quilting, and collage techniques; adaptive re-use; upcycling; transformations of abandoned infrastructure into new designs; replacements, displacements, and substitutions, among others. What do such practices have to say about sustainability, originality, materiality, wholeness? How might these engage with larger imperatives today to ‘remake’ or rethink ways of being, to respond to crises both cultural and political? How can remaking speak, critically and fundamentally, to the nature of making, both in earlier historical periods and today?
keywords: remaking, materiality, reuse, craft, design
G.2.1 Breathing Room – Jordan Bennett’s Souvenir
- Ryan Rice, OCAD University/Onsite Gallery
This proposed presentation reveals the creative and curatorial process leading to Jordan Bennett’s solo exhibition Souvenir, which draws upon his inspired intentions to visit, activate and respond to the innovative design aesthetics embedded, woven and veiled in the richness and distinction of Mi’kmaq visual culture. The interdisciplinary and intuitive approach his work employs, celebrates a restored vitality of overlooked cultural expressions that carry elaborate Mi’kmaq cosmology. Bennett culls and contemporizes this visual language by reinterpreting customary geometric motifs that were embellished in highly valued Victorian-era antiquities of porcupine quillwork and basketry souvenir settler trade economies thriving on the east coast in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The result exhibits the artist’s creative practice and curator’s collaborative research as a conscious decolonial process to rematriate the memory and agency of (museum) collected objects he reveres by honouring his relationship to his ancestors; generations of artists who inspire him to warrant cultural continuity for Mi’kmaq visual traditions to flourish and their worldview to be witnessed.
keywords: Indigenous, visual culture, decolonial, curatorial, design
Ryan Rice, Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawake, is a curator and the Associate Dean at OCAD University. His institutional and independent curatorial career spans 30 years in community, museums, artist run centres and galleries. He received a Master of Arts in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, New York; graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and received an Associate of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Rice’s writing on contemporary Onkwehón:we art has been published in numerous periodicals, journals and exhibition catalogues, and he has lectured widely. Since 2021, Rice was appointed Curator, Indigenous Art at Onsite Gallery and has coordinated two public art commissions as the Indigenous Public Art Curator with Waterfront Toronto. In 2022, he is presenting three solo exhibitions including Jordan Bennett: Souvenir at Onsite Gallery, Pageant: Natalie King at Centre [3] and Versification: January Rogers at daphne Art Centre.
G.2.2 Slow time: the in between of making
Andrew Testa, Grenfell Campus, Memorial University
As a collector of things—things I pass, things I find, things that are forgotten, unnoticed and left behind—I have become increasingly aware of the things I discard, particularly within my practice as a maker. As a printmaker by trade, I have various failed prints, proofs, and trimmed edges that are typically discarded once ‘an edition’ has come to completion. But I have always dwelled on these snippets of progress/digress towards a completed ‘thing.’
During the initial stages of the pandemic, I did not have the opportunity to continue my printmaking practice. I did however learn to make new things/develop new skills, with an abundance of daunting, slow, and urgent time laid before me. I began sewing outfits (for performative processes within my art practice) and carving wooden spoons (for personal use and to gift to others), both seemingly calling attention the immediacy of the domestic space I became isolated within. And in both regards, I made, I failed, and I ultimately produced plenty of discards, off-cuts, and the residues of learning.
For this paper/talk, I wish to use my practice as a case study to investigate the wholeness of art practices, or more particularly, the in betweenness of making when a thing made is not seen as the pinnacle of the process. This paper thinks through failed things and off-cuts, wood chips and bark, and scraps of fabric and thread that were produced as a side effect of making (a side effect now paused upon to be celebrated).
keywords: off cuts, trials, failure, in between
Andrew Testa is an artist, writer and educator working through printmaking, drawing, books, words, sounds, installations and collaborations, currently living and working in Ktaqmkuk, also known as Newfoundland. He has been awarded ArtsNL, SSHRC, a VP Grenfell Research Grant, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant for his research, has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has participated in residencies and conferences across Canada. Testa has recently shared his work in solo exhibition at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s, NL, and at SNAP artist-run-centre in Edmonton, AB. Testa is the Chair of the Board of Directors at St. Michael’s Printshop and is an Assistant Professor in printmaking at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Testa has additionally taught at Thomson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, and at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, ON. He completed his BFA and MFA at York University in Toronto, ON.
G.2.3 Vibrant Things
- Stephen Severn, OCAD University
I am proposing, in this talk, to present chapters from my OCAD University MFA thesis—Solid Things and Arranging Things—in which I describe my practice of re-using, upcycling, transforming, and replacing/substituting found and readymade objects using the processes of casting, assemblage, installation, photography, and prose. The account of my studio-based research, together with examples of creative/literary precedents, engages in critical dialogue with thing theory, vibrant matter, and queer theory to uncover how a renewed collaboration between humans and non-humans contributes to a politics of world-building. Through the development of a conceptual framework of ‘vibrant things’, I describe how all matter is fluid, non-hierarchical, and in relation and how an orientation to the vibrancy of things opens up possibility and different ways of being in the world. This talk will elaborate on how an art practice and the agency of human-object relation can participate in this shift as a special mode of relation to matter, materiality, and things—how collaboration with the material world can mend—can re:make—ethical modes of making and of existence.
keywords: vibrant things, thing theory, vibrant matter, assemblage, queer
Stephen Severn is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice provides a space for the exploration of human and object ontogeny. His work incorporates still life photography, assemblage, and installation to observe objects in a process of becoming alongside human existence, where human-object relations intertwine and transform through queer time, space, and movement. His interest in objects started in his commercial practice where, as a set designer and photography stylist, Stephen works with objects, highlights their aesthetic appeal, and creates spaces and contexts in which they reside. He is a recent graduate from OCAD University’s Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design MFA program and recipient of the 2021 Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC graduate grant.
G.2.4 Collage Aesthetics: The elimination of the craft experience in collage
- Elyse Longair, Queen's University
Collage relies upon profound understandings of the images and materials being used, with the ability to see beyond the realities and meanings of the ‘original’. It also invites us to recognize relationships made possible through (re)imagining already existing images in the world. This paper focuses on the elimination of the craft experience in collage, encouraging the viewer to imagine freely the possibility of the image. With a specific focus on the important qualities of this collage approach (1) presenting the images as a flat seamless surface, (2) visually similar source material, (3) limiting the number of images used and (4) embracing subtly. I will present several direct comparisons between historical examples of works that I consider eliminate craft elements and my own collage works, focusing on the key qualities outlined above. The artistic spectrum will be explored through Max Ernst, Martha Rosler, John Stezaker and Henrik Olesen, who push the limits of how we think and approach the idea of collage.
keywords: collage, aesthetics, craft, imagination
Elyse Longair is an artist, curator and image theorist, currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. In 2021, Longair received her MFA from the Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design program at OCAD University. From 2020-2021, she was an RBC Emerging Artist at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Longair’s ‘simple image’ theory in collage re-imagines the role of images away from the overt-complexity that dominates our world, opening up new possibilities for imagined futures.
