Animated gif of the takedown of Polytopia from the upArt 2011 installation.
It took months to make, a week to assemble, 4 hours to hoist up, 2 hours to nail in place, and only 1 hour to take down. It was kind of sad!
This project has a lot of life of its own, in a way, and ripping out the staples felt like disecting some creature. I kept whispering to it that it shouldn’t worry, and that I hoped it didn’t hurt too much. A surprisingly strong and strange reaction to the task at hand, and no doubt the thick layer of fatigue that filtered my reality at that point in the exhibition had lots to do with it.
Marc Ngui takes down the Polytopia component of The Reef installation. There was a whole lot of ladder action with this project...
Polytopia is an ongoing textile art project and it formed the background component for the Reef installation that happened 27 – 30 October 2001 as part of the Gladstone Hotel’s upART art fair in Toronto, Canada.
The exhibit was wonderfully photographable, and as a result we have hundreds of images to edit of the installation and exhibition, and those are coming, too.
Here are some photos of arrangements of sewn textile pyramids laid out on my studio floor to test composition before being sewn up into a large three dimentional quilt called Polytopia.
This Geom was made to be part of a larger installation of textile art and paper sculptures called The Reef, on display 27 to 30 October 2011 at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto for the annual upART Contemporary Art Fair.
A scan of a sketchbook of drawings that were made concurrently to an ongoing discussion in the RNA Connective about the nature of technology and its effect on human culture.
The nomadic lifestyle is coming to a close. After 5 years of uprootedness, Marc and I will be moving to a new home for 1 February 2011. We have signed a year lease on a sprawling apartment in Cambridge, Ontario. The apartment is a portion of a 120 year old stone mansion and will give us the much needed grounding and the sheer volume and area of space needed for larger, more ambitious works of art.
In the meantime, for the month of January 2011 we are house sitting in our old university town of Waterloo, Ontario. It’s in the snow belt, oh yes, it’s very peaceful and quiet.
I have been balming my impatient pangs of biding time in a transition space by sewing up and embroidering one Happy Sleepy after another.
The Stagljar Lab website recently got updated. Marc drew some new illustrations, a few new pages were added, nicer photo page layouts for bigger photos, bigger and better navigation, larger text fonts and a wider, bigger layout (monitors are getting larger!)
Header of the homepage of Igor Stagljar Lab at the Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto. Featuring the oh-so-endearing glowing crystals animated gif. India ink illustration by Marc Ngui, digital colouring and development by Magda Wojtyra.
“The Too Cool For School Art & Science Fair was invented to turn the spotlight on the unexpected feats of imagination and exploration that are happening all around us,” writes Sally McKay of her most recent brainchil on the home page of the project, www.artandsciencefair.ca.
Some earrings are finally up in the Ladilola shop on Etsy. I’ve been trying out various backgrounds and styles of photography, experimenting with what works as a process for me and also how the photos then look in the shop and within Etsy search results.
Ladilola earrings in black patent leather in a geometric, pointy shape.
This is a new logo for Ladilola casual printing needs, to match the silver foil stickers I had made while still in France in 2008.
I first made some earrings five years ago out of scrap leather and beads because I didn’t like anything in the shops, and I gave a bunch of pairs away as presents. They were a hit!
About a month ago I started using the Panasoni GF-1 camera, with the “pancake” lens (f1.7, 40mm lens equivalent). Very happy with the camera, and this is also my first time shooting RAW format files. VERY happy about that.
