SCRIBBLE

October 13- November 13, 2011

opening reception: Thursday, October 13 from 7-10pm

Project Room Gallery installation

Amanda McCavour’s work holds a tenuous place between fine art and fine craft. McCavour’s background in both fibre and drawing media brought her to explore the idea of thread as a drawing material. Through these explorations, [...]]]> Amanda McCavour

SCRIBBLE

October 13- November 13, 2011

opening reception: Thursday, October 13 from 7-10pm

Project Room Gallery installation

Amanda McCavour’s work holds a tenuous place between fine art and fine craft. McCavour’s background in both fibre and drawing media brought her to explore the idea of thread as a drawing material. Through these explorations, McCavour  began using thread as a line instead of object and as a material outside of the context of weaving or fabric. In her work, hundreds of individual threads are sewn to make a drawing. Through her installation work, McCavour continues to develop her philosophy of thread in relation to the forms- the idea of individual parts that make a whole.

Please read more on “Scribble” and upcoming projects by Amanda McCavour.

Interested in the vulnerability of thread, its ability to unravel and its strength when sewn together, McCavour focuses on this idea of accumulation of line in a new installation titled, Scribble in the Lonsdale Gallery project room. The Scribble series was inspired by  spirograph drawings. By layering modular units of thread drawings,  different densities of colored thread lines are created. The result is an intricate three dimensional scribble, a physical embodiment of accumulated line and repetitive action.

Upcomming Projects for Amanda McCavour:

October 27- November 1, 2011: Art Toronto, Metro Convention Centre, 255 Front St. W.

Amanda McCavour’s installation “Stand In for Home” has been selected as a Special Project installation for this year’s Art Toronto 2011. McCavour will also be featured in Lonsdale Gallery’s booth at the fair, booth#1008

November 3, 2011: Gala Event for Textile Museum reDESIGN project, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. W.

In November, the Textile Museum of Canada will launch reDESIGN at the Gladstone Hotel on the occasion of the Museum’s 36th birthday. The Project: to redesign, reimagine and reinvent an armchair that will be auctioned that night, with proceeds in support of the exhibitions, collections and public programs of the Textile Museum.

Opening reception Thursday, November 3 from 6:30- 9:30 pm

November 3-February 27: MADE Project at the Gladstone Cafe, 12 14 Queen St. W. “Accumulate” installation by Amanda McCavour

For “Accumulate” building, stacking and folding will be explored in relation to McCavour’s embroidered thread pieces.  It will be the accumulation of these actions that will create form and patterns in the work.   These pieces will be a playful exploration of materials and structure, where the accumulation of line and folds will become sculptural.

Opening reception Thursday, November 3 from 6:30- 9:30 pm. McCavour’s installation will be on display at the Gladstone Cafe until the end of February, 2012.

For information contact Stanzie Tooth at 416-487-8733;  info@lonsdalegallery.com
410 Spadina Road, Toronto, Ontario, M5P 2W2,
Gallery Hours: Thursday – Sunday 11-5pm or by appointment.

Avian at Lonsdale Gallery
Until Feb. 20, 410 Spadina Rd, Toronto; www.lonsdalegallery.com

When I mentioned to a friend that I had seen Avian, a new group show about birds at the Lonsdale Gallery, he let loose with several dozen reasons why he dislikes birds. I [...]]]> From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, February 5, 2011

Avian at Lonsdale Gallery
Until Feb. 20, 410 Spadina Rd, Toronto; www.lonsdalegallery.com

When I mentioned to a friend that I had seen Avian, a new group show about birds at the Lonsdale Gallery, he let loose with several dozen reasons why he dislikes birds. I was baffled. Unlike, say, horses, with their colossal, bone-crushing builds and sharp hooves, most birds are small, timid, and often come in comforting colours. Some people have weird reactions to animals.

Avian is a deceptively simple show, one devoid of peacock hues or flashy displays of pillowy plumage. Thus it requires concentration to fully appreciate, because, let’s face it, everybody knows what a bird looks like. It’s the conveyance, the ways in which the bird sculptures and images are fabricated, that soars here, not the actual depictions, which tend to favour common birds over exotic Tweetys.

To wit, Julie Oakes’s dazzling flock of Murano glass sparrows, hand-blown in Italy to her specifications, hover over the gallery like a vast pearly chandelier. Captured in various moments of flight, from full wingspan swoops to wings-to-the-side dives, the sparrows are simultaneously weightless and pendulous, fragile and crystalline hard.

Avian’s curator, Stanzie Tooth, told me that Oakes is currently having many more birds fabricated, and plans to show them at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, in Waterloo, Ont. During that exhibition, one bird a day will be allowed to drop and smash on the gallery floor. So see Oakes’s sun catchers now, before it’s too late.

Amanda McCavour’s “thread drawings” (her term) of birds combine the compact toughness of thick upholstery embroidery with a lace-like transparency and ballpoint-doodle freshness.

McCavour constructs her sculptures by sewing an image onto a water-soluble material, layering her threads heavily in some spots, to create strong outlines, and letting other parts remain almost vacant, connected via a single thread. When she is done, she simply immerses the thread and secret material in water until the supporting concoction dissolves, leaving only the “drawing” behind.

Like Oakes, McCavour is exploring the dual reality of birds, animals that are designed to defy gravity, and yet are tough as nails (or talons) – animals we put in dainty cages to better admire their chipper songs and pretty colours, genetic traits left over from when they were ravenous dinosaurs. What better materials to capture this marvellous conflation than brittle but heavy glass and airy but binding thread?

An added bonus: Along with her show-stopping glass works, Oakes offers a series of beautiful and creepy, bone-white ceramic sculptures of birds. Many of the birds face the viewer full-frontal with their bellies and legs contorted and arched; poses that can be read, depending on how you interpret the birds’ facial expressions, as depicting the animals in mid flight, in rigor mortis, or, pardon my anthropomorphizing, in a state of sexual arousal.
Like I said, some people have weird reactions to animals.

Avian explores the concept of bird as icon. Icon of flight, nesting, migration, fragility and independence. Every culture holds the bird in a place of mysticism. We anthropomorphize birds in an attempt to [...]]]> Avian
Featured Artists: Joan Kaufman, Amanda McCavour, Julie Oakes, Peggy Taylor Reid
Exhibition Dates: January 16 – February 20, 2011