Generation: Amanda Rataj (January 14 - February 25, 2023)

'Generation' at Craft Ontario. Photo by Jocelyn Reynolds.

January 14 - February 25, 2023
Reception: Sunday, January 22 from 2-5pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

‘Generation’ is a two-person exhibition by Hamilton-based artist and weaver Amanda Rataj and her late grandfather, master woodworker and furniture designer Rudolph Rataj.

"In the 1960s my paternal grandfather became the principal designer and shop manager for a successful furniture company in Toronto called Brunswick Manufacturing. For the following two decades, they supplied locally made, well-built institutional furniture to universities, community centres, and hospitals throughout the GTA.

In my home I have six chairs built by Brunswick Manufacturing that are covered in their original fabric — each of my grandfather's children got a matching set of chairs, and I have my father's set. I have designed, sampled, and hand woven yardage to reupholster these chairs. The original fabric is plain, brown, and synthetic — very representative of the late 1970s when they were made. The new textile covering for each chair takes its cues from the coloured light in shadows, and is made from natural fibres and padded with local wool felt.

My grandfather died before I was born, but his material influence has always been a part of my life, through the family cottage he designed and built, and in the countless chairs, tables, and furniture I have lived with, slept on, and used in my day to day. I’ve always taken this material landscape for granted while knowing very little about the maker.

Ultimately, this exhibition contributes to a conversation about Toronto’s small-scale industries, institutional furniture, and craft history. Through this exhibition, my work may help viewers identify items of Brunswick manufacturing that they know through offices, classrooms, and boardrooms, creating a conversation about the crafted environment of our institutional spaces."

– Amanda Rataj

 

Amanda Rataj is an artist and weaver living and working in Hamilton, Ontario. She has studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and Kawashima Textile School in Kyoto, Japan. Amanda has developed her contemporary craft practice through research-based projects, artist residencies, professional exhibitions, and lectures. She has exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada, Royal Ontario Museum, and the Art Gallery of Burlington, among others. Amanda regularly writes about textiles and publishes her textile designs online and in print, working with companies like Gist Yarn and Fiber in Boston, MA, and international publications like Väv Magasinet in Sweden.

amandarataj.com

 

Amanda Rataj acknowledges funding support from the Ontario Arts Council.

 

 

'Generation' is part of the 2023 DesignTO Festival.

 

 

Second Life: Vanessa Yanow (September 1 - October 1, 2022)

'Second Life' at Craft Ontario. Photo by Jocelyn Reynolds.

September 1 - October 1, 2022
Reception: Thursday, September 1 from 6-9pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

“Each piece from the ‘Second Life’ series includes an unfinished antique textile piece made in the 20th century by anonymous women. Considered hobby projects, these artifacts were each abandoned at various stages of completion. I documented each of them before beginning, researched their technique and place in history, and then transformed them into completed sculptures using elements of glass, textiles and mixed media.

The objects’ incompleteness is my road in. I start where my “collaborator” left off. I extract the love, frustration, boredom, eccentricities, or whatever traces of this unknown person’s humanity that I can divine from the piece and let these characteristics take the lead. If I can respect some of the original author’s intentions while inserting my personal interpretation of the work to transform it into something new and meaningful, I will have succeeded in this rejuvenation process. I am the final chapter in a story that unexpectedly stopped in time. Though separated from the author by time, culture and age, the process of transforming these objects allows me to cross the boundaries that continue to persist between art and craft, the past and present, the young and elderly, what is old and new, technology and handmade, and between traditional techniques and conceptual art practices.”

– Vanessa Yanow

 Vanessa Yanow is a queer artist who works primarily with textiles, flame worked glass and found objects. They have been reviewed and featured in many North American publications as an exceptional craftsperson, but their BFA in Paint from RISD points the way back to a grounding in the visual arts, lending their work a unique strength that defies categorization. Their sculptural work has been shown in museums in Canada, and in galleries and art fairs internationally. Their work is also part of the city of Montreal’s permanent collection, the collection of Le Musée des Maitres et Artisans in Montréal and in the Musée National in Québec City. Yanow currently lives and works in Tiohtià:ke (aka Montreal) out of The Long Haul – a nonprofit, artist-run organization that they cofounded in 2001.

www.vanessayanow.com

We would like to thank the CALQ for their support in getting this work and the artist to Toronto.

 

Reflections on Growth: Michelle Mendlowitz (July 8 - August 27, 2022)

'Reflections on Growth' at Craft Ontario. Photo by Jocelyn Reynolds.

July 8 - August 27, 2022
Reception: Friday, July 8 from 6-9pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

‘Reflections on Growth’ is a solo exhibition of sculptural ceramic works by Toronto-based artist Michelle Mendlowitz that explores the relationships we have with our bodies. The forms are ambiguous and organic, and their self-containment – each one an enclosed volume – recall internal organs. The gently pinched surface is highlighted by Mendlowitz’s thickly applied glaze that drips down the surface, alluding to flesh and tissue. The glaze colours are unsettling with soft mottled blues and pinks contrasted with an oil-dark glaze suggestive of a creeping necrosis.

The resulting sculptures are at once familiar and alien, beautiful and grotesque. Their discordance is born out of Mendlowitz’s experience of her own body as she coped with recurrent fibroids, which are growths on or in the uterus. Interested in how fibroids grow, Mendlowitz wondered, How do they feed off of me? How do they expand and contract? How do they attach themselves? How do they organically multiply? Mendlowitz’s sculptures speak to the difficulty in reconciling body and mind, particularly in the antagonistic conditions of chronic illness and pain. At the same time, ‘Reflections on Growth’ exemplifies a strategy for reconciliation: in thoughtful and embodied art-making, body and mind become collaborators working through a challenge as one.

– Robyn Wilcox, Curator

 Michelle Mendlowitz is a Toronto-based ceramic artist. She received a Bachelor of Design from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2005. Since graduating she has maintained a studio practice making both functional and sculptural objects. Mendlowitz has shown work throughout Canada and the US. She has received awards from Craft Ontario and the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, among others, and grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Craft Ontario. Mendlowitz has taught ceramics in studios across Toronto since 2005 and is currently instructing at OCAD University, the Gardiner Museum, Prosserman JCC, and her studio at 1910 Danforth Ceramics.

www.michellemendlowitz.com

 

In the Presence of Change: Fiona Duthie & Amee Raval (April 30 – June 18, 2022)

April 30 – June 18, 2022
Reception: Friday, April 29, 6-9pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

‘In the Presence of Change’ is a two-person exhibition featuring the work of fibre artist Fiona Duthie and glass artist Amee Raval that explores themes of resilience and transformation.

Composed of 132 unique tiles, Fiona Duthie’s wall installation is a study in materiality. Titled ‘Resilience’, the installation is an outgrowth of her more traditional felt-making practice that delves into the transformation of common materials through extreme processes. The foundation of each tile is a BC fir-offcut from a local building site, which is blackened and preserved using a traditional Japanese method of charring the wood surface with flame (shou sugi ban). Providing contrast to the charred wood is 'paper felt', a medium Duthie developed that is a labour-intensive marriage between traditional Korean papermaking (joomchi) and wool feltmaking. Ceramic elements, fired in the extreme heat of a kiln, reach out from the tiles, which are then finished with inks made from soot that Duthie collected from forest fire-burnt trees in BC and Australia. Duthie invites interaction from visitors to move and rearrange the tiles into new configurations throughout the exhibition. Through these changes—planned and unplanned⁠—the installation maintains its visual integrity. “Nature and humanity share this trait,” Duthie contends, “in the face of adversity, we are both resilient.”

Amee Raval’s colourful cast glass pieces stand in contrast to the limited palette of ‘Resilience’. The ‘Goddess’ series features a trio of sculptural female forms that draw on the traditional imagery of Raval’s Hindu heritage. However, each piece is subtly transformed through the incorporation of elements such as boxing gloves and carpentry tools—objects at odds with traditional notions of femininity. Through these contrasts, Raval aims to show a culture in which patriarchal norms are being challenged by progressive feminist ideals. Similarly, Raval’s floor installation draws on rangoli, a traditional Hindu art form of creating geometric patterns on floors or tabletops from everyday materials, practiced particularly by women and girls in celebration of Festivals. In lieu of the flower petals or coloured sands that might make up a conventional rangoli, Raval’s piece is composed of hammers, wrenches and screwdrivers rendered in colourful cast glass—tools conventionally associated with men and male labour.

Although contrasting in material, palette, and figuration/abstraction, Duthie and Raval’s pieces both bear witness to moments of transformation and change—individual, societal, and global. They draw on traditional craft practices, implemented through a contemporary lens. At a moment that feels unprecedented, it is good to remember that we have always been invited to participate in transformation—the only constant in life, as they say, is change.

– Robyn Wilcox, Curator

 

Fiona Duthie is an fibre artist/maker recognized for her dynamic surface design. She has a full time studio practice on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. Being in this beautiful natural space surrounded by forest, rocky beaches, the ocean and a strong artist community has allowed her creative practice to thrive. Duthie's work has been published in many international textile arts publications. She has exhibited widely in both public and private galleries in Canada, the US, New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

www.fionaduthie.com

Amee Raval is an emerging glass artist based in Mississauga, Ontario. Following more than a decade as a marketing and business professional, Raval decided to pursue her passion for glass, graduating with a Bachelor’s in Craft & Design from Sheridan College in 2019. Raval is a Resident Artist at Mississauga’s Living Arts Centre and a Glass Art Association of Canada board member.

www.niravanadesigns.com

 

Fiona Duthie acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

 

Moving in Circles: Zimra Beiner (March 5 - April 22, 2022)

'Moving in Circles' at Craft Ontario. Photo by Jocelyn Reynolds.

March 5 – April 22, 2022
Reception: Friday, April 22 from 6-9pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

‘Moving in Circles’ is a solo exhibition of sculptural ceramic works exploring the global movement of goods, the complexity of ceramic production, and material hierarchy by Toronto-born, Calgary-based artist Zimra Beiner. Using the form of the vessel, Beiner’s sculptural works are assemblages of ceramics made in various clay bodies – porcelain, stoneware, and unknown commercial clays – intermixed with found objects collected from thrift stores, garden stores, and small-scale pottery factories. The components are glued and fastened together with obvious seams and provisionally repaired fractures.

Integral to the exhibition is its display: a structure built in-situ by Beiner primarily using cardboard boxes. With ceramic works nested inside, the installation brings to mind the international transit of artworks between galleries and collectors, as well as a U-Haul box of thrifted dinnerware en route to a new home. It’s as if the two boxes – the Art and the dinnerware – collided in transit and the casualty is context, setting adrift any indicators of value. Beiner’s installation also exposes some of the other labours of artistic production: the packing, shipping, unpacking, repairing, storing, and displaying, among others. Which activities are valued? Which materials and forms? ‘Moving in Circles’ is a self-reflexive look at ceramic production and its role within both personal and global systems of value and influence.

– Robyn Wilcox, Curator

 Zimra Beiner received a BFA from NSCAD University in 2009 and an MFA from Alfred University in 2012. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Canada, including exhibitions at The Hole NYC, Present CO, Cross Mackenzie Gallery, and the Gardiner Museum. Recent awards include The Winnifred Shantz Award, The NCECA Emerging Artist Award, nomination for The RBC Emerging Artist Award in Ceramics, and recent residencies include The Berlin Ceramics Centre, Private Studio Jingdezhen, China, and The Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach. He is currently Assistant Professor in Ceramics at the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary, Canada.

zimrabeiner.com

 

Liminal Monuments: Claudia Gutierrez (January 13 - February 26, 2022)

'Liminal Monuments' at Craft Ontario. Photo by Jocelyn Reynolds.

January 13 - February 26, 2022
Reception: Thursday, January 13 from 6-9pm – CANCELLED
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

‘Liminal Monuments’ is a solo exhibition of embroidered textile works exploring Latinx identity, ancestral iconography and commemoration by Ottawa-based artist Claudia Gutierrez. In collaboration with photographer Pat Bolduc, images of Gutierrez’s pieces exhibited alongside the objects add a narrative quality. The textiles are held in the arms of Latinx subjects—including Gutierrez and her sisters—obfuscated in a dream-like blur of the camera. For Gutierrez, memories are like dreams: liminal spaces distorted by our past, present and future. They are an unstable, shifting foundation for personal identity.

Gutierrez’s embroidered works draw on the powerful history of textiles as symbols of national identity. Her pieces reference rebozos (shawls traditionally worn by Mexican women), paliacates (the bandanas worn by Zapatistas, the predominantly Indigenous rebel group that has been in conflict with the Mexican state for decades), as well as the hoop earrings that are central to Chicana culture, a shared identity of some Mexican Americans. As a first generation Canadian born to a Uruguayan mother and Mexican father, Gutierrez herself oscillates between heritages, customs, symbols, and languages. What are the icons of diasporic identity? Which events and people are commemorated? Perhaps, Gutierrez posits, it is something always out of reach—always shifting and changing, layered in space and time—something more like a dream or a memory.

– Robyn Wilcox, Curator

 

Claudia Gutierrez is an artist and activist whose practice has been deeply informed by residencies in Canada and Mexico. Her practice engages in textile, printmaking, and painting mediums. Gutierrez has been exhibiting her work in Ontario and Quebec, Canada since 2010 and has completed numerous public art and cultural outreach projects in Ottawa. She was awarded the SAW Prize for New Works in 2020, is supported by the Ontario Arts Council and was recently awarded a major public art project with Canadian Heritage. In addition to her artistic practice, Gutierrez works as a curator and arts administrator.

claudiagutierrezart.com

 

'Liminal Monuments' is part of the 2022 DesignTO Festival, January 21-30.

 

 

Claudia Gutierrez gratefully acknowledges support from the Ontario Arts Council. 

 

Arboreal: Daniel Gruetter and Juliana Scherzer (August 21 - October 2, 2021)

'Arboreal' at Craft Ontario. Photo by Jocelyn Reynolds.

August 21 - October 2, 2021
Reception-by-appointment: Sunday, September 12 from 11am-4pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

‘Arboreal’ is an exhibition of recent work by woodworker Daniel Gruetter and textile artist Juliana Scherzer exploring how we relate to material, place, and nature. Created using tree materials—fallen leaves for Juliana and local wood for Daniel—these works interrogate our role within, and responsibility to, the natural environment.

Juliana Scherzer’s quilt-pieced leaf works developed out of a week-long, land-based residency in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Chéticamp, Nova Scotia. Informed by the park’s restoration and conservation efforts, Juliana’s experiments led to a method of encasing fallen leaves in glycerin. By preserving the leaves’ flexibility, she is able to manipulate them like textiles, constructing her works through cutting, quilt-piecing, and machine-sewing. The result is evocative of wooded paths, rhizomes and roots, insect burrows, tree canopies, and watersheds—vectors ranging in scale from micro to macro. At the same time, familiar quilting techniques call to mind heirloom quilts pieced from a baby blanket, an outgrown dress, an old work shirt, all sewn together to create a network of connections between people and their stories. And that’s the point: these systems—human, animal, fungal, vegetal—are enmeshed and indivisible.

Through his furniture and objects, Daniel Gruetter reveals the intrinsic value of wood. His work expresses the unique capacities of local woods and reframes “flaws” as valuable and essential parts of the material. Daniel’s approach to material, one of observation and response, draws on traditional craft methodologies and their relationship to the natural world.

Each of Daniel’s pieces highlights a specific material trait. The technique of oxidation, for example, combines iron with the natural tannins in wood to create dramatic colours that vary by species. ‘Live-edge table #1’ utilizes an expansion joint made from a crack, a feature that highlights the forces inherent in wood as it expands and contracts. The handheld objects are sculptural ergonomic shapes, finely finished to optimize the tactility of wood. This attentive and caring relationship to materials extends out to the whole of the natural world, and offers an alternative ideology to our current economic system of extractive capitalism that treats natural resources as commodities for exploitation and is an ongoing driver of colonialism.

Both artists’ work express a sense of care that comes from understanding yourself as a node in a network of relations; that being in relation means a reciprocity and a responsibility to the material and, in turn, all of the material’s connections.

– Robyn Wilcox, Curator

 

Daniel Gruetter is a woodworker based in Toronto, Canada. He was born and raised in Bella Coola, a remote community nestled in British Columbia’s coast mountains. He graduated from the University of British Columbia with a BA in History in 2010. Daniel has worked with local and international artists, architects, and designers to provide finely made furniture and objects for a wide variety of contexts from private homes to commercial spaces and hospitality enterprises. He provides design services, as well as batch production and custom woodwork.

www.danielgruetter.com

 

Juliana Scherzer is a textile artist working primarily in free-motion machine embroidery and quilted leaves. After graduating from Sheridan College with a Bachelor of Craft and Design (2018), Juliana spent three years as an artist-in-residence at the Cape Breton Centre for Craft and Design where she continued to build her practice while branching out into production work and teaching a range of textile and art courses in the community. In August 2021 Juliana relocated to Toronto to join Harbourfront Centre’s Artist-in-Residence Program.

www.julianascherzer.com

 Juliana would like to acknowledge the support of Arts Nova Scotia with their Presentation Grant.

 

Iron Identity: Contemporary Jewellery by Alex Kinsley Vey (June 11 - August 14, 2021)

'Iron Identity' at Craft Ontario. Photo by Jocelyn Reynolds.

A selection of work from this exhibition is available for sale in the Craft Ontario online shop.

June 11 - August 14, 2021
Reception by Appointment: Sat, Aug 7, 6-9pm & Sun, Aug 8, 1-4pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

‘Iron Identity’ is a solo exhibition of work by Toronto-based contemporary jeweller Alex Kinsley Vey.

“Hamilton, my hometown on the shore of Lake Ontario, has traditionally been a steel producing centre. Despite the industry having died down in recent decades, its industrial activity is still apparent. ‘Iron Identity’ references my time growing up there, and the impact this place had on me.

Brooches, rings and neckpieces evoke and commemorate this identity through the use of oxides, coarse finishing, and sturdy construction. I use colours associated with industrial machinery and abandoned sites – bright colours that contrast signs of rust and deterioration. Transporting this aesthetic to the body allows it to be worn close, displayed with pride, and given reverence as a jewellery object.

The places and structures I reference directly influenced the culture of Hamilton. These former steel mills, manufacturing facilities, and factories provided good, working class jobs, and were once economic symbols announcing the prosperity of the city. Now that we have moved into a post-industrial economy, these places look dirty and out of place. I grew up around the last of these industrial sites when the flame of industry was already diminished. I feel compelled to record the physical and emotional identity of this city in order to come to a better understanding of my own identity.”

– Alex Kinsley Vey

 

Alex Kinsley Vey is from Hamilton, Ontario, where he received jewellery training from his parents. Moving to Toronto in 2010, Alex studied jewellery at George Brown College, receiving an Advanced Diploma in Jewellery Arts in 2013. Alex has shown work in Canada, Europe, and the United States. He has been a member of Craft Ontario since 2012, Klimt02 since 2017, and was a Harbourfront Centre Craft and Design Artist-in-Residence from 2015-2019. He is currently a member at Jewel Envy in Toronto's west-end. Alex is a sessional instructor at OCAD University in Toronto, and has previously taught at George Brown College in Toronto, and NSCAD University in Halifax.

Alex is represented by Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h, Montréal.

www.kinsleyveydesigns.com

 

'Iron Identity' is part of the 2021 DesignTO Festival, January 22-31.

 

 

The artist gratefully acknowledges support from the Toronto Arts Council.

 

 

SECURITY BLANKET: Embroidered textiles by Jennifer Smith-Windsor (March 9 - April 7, 2021)

'SECURITY BLANKET' at Craft Ontario. Photo by Jocelyn Reynolds.

March 9 - April 7, 2021
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

The crisis of the global COVID-19 pandemic has drawn into sharp focus our collective global vulnerability against the threat of an unknown enemy. It has forced us to change our habits, from the way we work, shop, travel exercise, and perhaps most importantly, greet and visit friends and loved ones. It has forced us to ask critical questions such as: What does it mean to be safe and secure? How can we protect ourselves, our families, our friends and strangers? How can we secure our country from incoming, potentially unseen threats?

Coming at a time when we are all searching for comfort and the assurance that we will be safe, the SECURITY BLANKET series seeks to explore the above questions and more. The first object to touch a newborn baby, the blanket offers warmth and reassurance, but the blanket continues to be an object associated with well-being and security long after early childhood. Security is defined as a state of being safe and free from worry, but is there more to its meaning than initially suggested by this dictionary definition? SECURITY BLANKET explores two notions of security. First, the security of the home – represented by antique, handmade domestic textiles such as doilies and lace. And second, the security of the state – represented by eight government-issue military blankets from Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. These repurposed objects constitute a blank canvas onto which another layer of meaning can be added to their already nuanced histories. The intricate patterning created by the use of traditional embroidery stitches integrates these two divergent representations of security on both a physical and conceptual level, producing works of visually interesting contrast that provoke the viewer to consider their own relationship to home, comfort, safety and security.

Jennifer Smith-Windsor is a textile artist based in Stratford, Ontario. She was the 2019 recipient of the Craft Ontario Helen Frances Gregor Award for excellence in contemporary textile and in 2010 received the Mary Diamond Butts Scholarship in Embroidery and Needlecraft, also from Craft Ontario. Jennifer’s art practice focuses almost exclusively on hand embroidery. When hand stitching, she deliberately uses a limited range of stitches, exploring the wealth of possibilities that this restricted repertoire offers. Vintage, handmade textiles figure prominently in her work as reclaiming them and giving them a second life is incredibly important to her. They act as her starting point, a blank canvas onto which another layer of meaning can be added. She has always been drawn to cloth; embroidering as a child, sewing her own clothes as a teenager, studying textiles at university, working in theatre costume departments as a young adult and now with an active textile art practice. It is cloth’s intimate relationship to the body, its ubiquity in our lives, its associations with the home, its links to the past and its relevance to the future that continues to inspire her.

www.jennifersmith-windsor.com