The Organization of Kingston Women Artists will be posting their notices now on their website at http://www.okwa.org/

OKWA AGM

OKWA's AGM was held on Sunday, May 27 at Mieke's pastoral residence (in Kingston). 15 members were in attendance. Appreciation was expressed for the efforts of retiring Board members Martine Bresson, Zillah Loney, June Anderson and Alana Kapell.  New Board members were welcomed: Caroline Marshall, Rose Stewart and Peggy Morley (sharing secretary position) and Maya Jagger. Mieke VanGeest continues with membership and also adds the new title of Vice President! Mary Peppard continues to glue everyone together as the President. Diane Black has taken on maintenance of OKWA website.  Alana Kapell will continue to put out an occasional newsletter and blog. Much appreciation was expressed for Jane Derby's efforts in creating the Art Talks.

An animated discussion on several topics carried participants into a fine feast and later image presentations by Mieke and Martine Bresson.  Topics discussed were the upcoming Window Gallery Group Exhibit in August 2012,  jurying shows without judgement ie. ranking with juror's favourites rather than "Best in Show", encouraging OKWA group responses (not critiques) to our group exhibits, applying for grant assistance for Art Talks, to continue with bringing in an outside Juror for our annual group exhibit, to continue with prize awards,  to establish a mentoring program for members to learn how to organize a large group exhibit, 

Lee-Ann Taras new works

Lee-Ann Taras is participating in Downtown Kingston's Art After Dark at Jacqueline Jamieson's Gallery at 342 Princess St (beside the Royal Tavern). "Gravity & the Lightness of Being" will run until the end of July.

I AM WATER at Window Gallery in Kingston

April 2012 Art Talk at the Mansion in Kingston

Save Thursday, April 12 for the next OKWA artist talk at the Mansion.   Diane Black,  Margaret Hughes, and  Isidora Spielmann will be discussing their work,  exploring questions around the differing demands and requirements (if any) of art and craft. We hope to have a longer panel and group discussion this time so please think about questions or comments you might have for the speakers and the audience. 

NATALKA NATALKA NATALKA

Natalka Husar talked at the opening to the OKWA Library show on February 4th and followed that with a visual talk at Agnes Etherington the next day.  OKWA is honoured by Natalka's generosity with her time.  She also donated her honorarium back to OKWA to be used in the highschool scholarship fund.

Both talks are transcribed here:

Natalka's response to this posting: "What i said at the show reception was really what i meant.  What isn't clear was that i really feel you can't judge for "the best" when you have apples and oranges--  it's not fair to put paintings up against photos up against prints and bookworks and ceramic works and assemblages etc etc... because all have their merit and there is something honest and pure something artificial and forced in every single work of art.   I tried to look at the latter only as a method of elimination.   So my only suggestion to OKWA would be to reconsider the reason for having 'prizes' in the first place.     Maybe simply somebody to give a 'crit' if indeed artists want some outside feedback.  But  again-- the most important thing is FOLLOW YOUR HEART --even though that sounds like such a cliche.  So i chose work mainly whereI felt that was most evident."

Natalka Husar, Juror for 2012 OKWA Library Show:

" I am happy that I didn't know  you before I started judging.  I have met some of you since and you know you, and I love you.  It is different when you look at work and you know the person. 

I am an artist like you. When I looked around, I saw problems everywhere. I saw the same problems I see in my own work. I have a hard time making a decision, I really do.  So what I did, with Michele as a sounding board, I put on my teaching persona and I gave a tough crit to every single work, eg.  this is too genteel, this is too easy, this is too much blue, too much wax, too saleable, this is too cliche, this lies, this jokes, (you can't joke) this one is clever but only for a minute…I can see right through it, this one my mother-in-law would like, this one looks like it is painted by a guy--no woman could actually paint like that.  So that is what I did only because every work has merit.  

What I choose and what any juror or anybody in the art world would choose, that they would want whether it is to buy, to show, to sell, to curate is only a matter of opinion for that particular event.  What I reject, someone else in another situation will embrace. That is very important to keep in mind.  Every work here has merit; it has good and bad. I have looked at a lot of art, a lot of mediocre art, a lot of good art and a lot of bad art.  I have a huge appetite for bad art. I am very open to share that opinion with you individually if you like and it is just my opinion. It is nothing; its just one person's opinion. 

MARY PEPPARD

The paintings that survived this sort of whipping: I must say that "Chick and Two Chicks by Mary Peppard--I was attracted to that painting as soon as I walked in here before I even looked at anything else.  Because I couldn't believe it.  And then when I saw the title, I said "this cannot be serious."  The title is a joke, but despite that I loved the painting. I loved that painting because the composition is cool and warm.  There is all that blue--the blue pants, the blue sky and there is the ochre top and pants and the warm chicks. Even though it looks naive, it is naive in a way, it felt very much like the artist did not care what I thought or anyone thought but just wanted to do this. 

ERIKA OLSON

The second one that I had a hard time dismissing: I had a hard time saying "you are trying to fool me". I kept looking at all the work and looking at it as if I was talking to the artist saying, " I know what you are doing, you are trying to make it look good, you are trying to make it sell, you are trying to make it pleasant." When I looked at Erika Olson's Studio Painting, it is what it is and that honesty in it is what I couldn't criticize. What I liked about it-- first of all the juxtaposition of this strange, soft nest-the robin's egg nest, and that same shape but hard and cold porcelain and that badly painted cup, but that didn't matter. And in the space that doesn't really exist and the cast shadows that are illogical but the simplicity of that works despite all those faults. It works as an abstract and works with that simplicity of a Giorgio Morandi. So I chose that. I could be totally wrong. I say that the cup is badly painted but you might have intended that.

MARY CRAWFORD

It is beautifully hung.  I think of both of these works as one. If they were hung separately maybe I would see it differently. It does capture in a very fresh way, that soggy landscape. It bounces off in a voice that feels private and not cliche somehow. Normally I am very weary of things attached to paintings, ie. if you can't paint a log, attach it idea.  But despite that I thought that the painting felt very fresh.

I could have given 11 awards probably.  There are 2 honourable mentions.

Really a painting of this pond by Su Sheedy is like that. It is beautiful. That isn't always what I would look for in art. But despite that, it is seductive. It is a beautiful abstract and its wet. I like that.

The other that I was attracted to is TRACES #30 by Michele LaRose. From a distance it looks like a landscape with this fence and shed but when you get up close its not about that at all.

 I think it is fantastic that you do this.  It is very important that you not take what anyone says to heart and you continue doing what you want to do regardless because there is no formula and there are no rules in making art.

______________________________________

NATALKA HUSAR AT AGNES ETHERINGTON February 2012

I couldn't decide whether we would play THEATRE or AIRPLANE. (2 titles up on the screen).  But because the talk was billed BON VOYAGE we will do it kind of like a trip. Artist talks can be so flat and for a Sunday afternoon I appreciate you taking the time to come here. So we are going to try to have a little fun.

I am going to talk to you about my two obsessions. The first one is being an artist, the second one is the muse that I have picked--my parent's homeland, Ukraine.

We will do it like a trip: (image of stewardess) This is my alter ego but I actually was a flight attendant in another lifetime.  I used the character of a stewardess not at all biographically but just  (like an artist) as someone who transports people from one reality to another and leaving them jet-lagged. In a way this is the public persona of an artist, you have a show and this is what you do, you are a cultural guide. 

I do these kind of confessional paintings which are small where I try to place myself with my work.  This image is my persona as stewardess by night and a surgical nurse by day.  In the private persona of the artist  I see myself very much as a surgeon. By this I mean that I really like to be specific.  I like to get to the very heart of a wound. I like art that isn't on the periphery. I like to be exact. 

I have used these 2 characters in these little confessional works. In this image the stewardess is doing the waltz out of step, country music in another country, here dancing with the dead (Elvis head). Like painting they say is dead but it isn't, Elvis is alive and so is painting.  Here the nurse and Stew are playing old world music.

Painting really is like scrubbing the floor.

In this image I painted myself as this "has been".  Matinee Midwife has old work and new work juxtaposed. (the young girl is wearing different shoes) Here specifically you could say is a composition in grey black white. Its also a memory and a shoe like this growing up, and the other contemporary for its time.  I don't know exactly what it means but if it feels right I go with that.  When I use different shoes it also connotes not being able to run, a kind of bondage of sorts.  I understood that after I painted it .

A painting like this that still makes me kind of cringe, "Self Portrait of an Old Artist" still wanting to be turned on by your muse.

It takes us to a painting about being too confident as a painter. The last thing you can do as a painter is say 'Oh this is a masterpiece, I can just relax .' When you think like that all of a sudden the wings fall off.  It is a constant anxiety that everyone as an artist can feel. 

We are going to time travel.  I am going to give you a reader's digest version of my upbringing. That will inform you about why I do the work that I do.  We are going to go all the way back to 1955 New Jersey. I am four years old.  Kids are painting/drawing hearts, flowers, birds, bees, trees.  My parents see some promise in me and save the portfolio of the drawings I did at age four.  (images of christ on the cross, the black devil). Somehow early on the die was cast, I realized that art can have a very emotional power on the artist and the viewer.  I remember hearing stories of the crucifixion, being the most horrific stories i could imagine. Also, even in this age I realized you could use art to show good and evil.  In a way in essence my work has stayed like that.

1965 is the year that the Beatles came to New York and though I was an immigrant kid I was fortunate enough to go to Shea stadium and see them. Basically I show this to say to you that I felt very comfortable in both those worlds. From that time I possessed the key to both those houses. I spoke the language and I felt totally American.  I knew where the medicine cabinet was in both houses.

 I did a few bodies of work 20 years later using this kind of imagery in my work (Ukrainian and American content)  I realized as a young artist that this was a secret that I had, a gold mine, that I had information that other people didn't have.  As I started doing more work in this vein, the theme of the identity of displacement and dislocation became dominant in my work. I didn't even know what the word 'identity' meant at that time, it was 1985.  But my parents' obliterated homeland and the face of the people that were left behind became a sado-masochistic obsession for the last 20 years. 

A seminal piece from that time was Pandora's parcel from the Ukraine now at the National Art Gallery.  It was with this work that I took a character like this to be emblematic of this country in the beginning of change.  That character has been growing with my work.  When I was in the Ukraine in 1992 I saw this girl sucking her thumb, who had a look as if her wings had been clipped. She was too shy, coyness.  She was from the Chernobyl area.  I changed her throughout my paintings, (image) Here she is sucking her thumb attempting to be luring and missing the mark.  (image) Here I don't know where I am going with her, she is sort of an obstacle in my painting. (Natalka shows the evolution of the painting of the figure).  If I have a plan of where I am going, I don't want to go there.  (Seed Spitter).

Getting a grant to go to Ukraine to do research with poet Janice.  We thought this was fantastic. I got paid to do what I want to do.  I really hit a wall when I got there. What happened is that I started to question what it is that I, as an artist, can actually say or do or contribute to a conversation that was already universal ie. everyone was already talking about what was happening in Ukraine. It wasn't my own playground anymore, it was public. 

 I am not really a photographer. I didn't want to be documenting what was there, that's for photographers. I am a painter. I didn't want to write because all these journalists were writing. At the same time it was hyper stimulating.  (images of contemporary Ukraine) Even though the images were very exciting they weren't anything that I could use in art.  You would think that for someone like me who loves grotesquery and bad taste this would be very inspiraring. But it wasn't, it was art already on its own. It didn't need my intervention. Even  candy looked like eye candy with titles like 'Masterpiece'.  Playboy billboards on the street in 2005.  Women in public half dressed.  I had never seen anything like this so absurd.  It is usually stimulating but for me it was very frustrating. 

I went to the country and found more interesting subjects for me.  Like this look of ennui, a desire for something better, for another life.  I took all photos of men squatting. People hung around in this position all the time, making deals with a kind of innocence.  I didn't know what anything meant.  

What I was looking for is what I call the "indescribable".  This is what you want as an artist to be able to speak about that which cannot be articulated, not spoken.  I found a sense of that in this little anecdote: a couple of months before I went with Janice (the poet she collaborated with) to Ukraine, I went with my mother and my cousin for one week. We went to this castle. My mother says ' I am a ruin already, I don't want to look at ruins. I am going to go to the coffeehouse.' So I go to the castle. The castle has tons of tourists, none speaking Ukrainian.  And then I hear a child's voice, it was beautiful Ukrainian.  And they turn around and the woman is blind.  And something happens where the artist in me takes over the human in me and I have to have a photo of this.  I reach into my pocket and whatever I pull out which happens to be a twenty dollar bill, and the ugly American in me gives the kid the twenty dollar bill and asks to take a photo of him.  I took only one photo. (image).  And that photo was what I was looking for. I wanted to do work that felt like what that woman was doing (the blind companion of the boy). 

I filled up a couple of sketchbooks in Ukraine and I started to collect old Leningrad oils, dead artist paints. I heard from word of mouth that these are extremely good paints. Paints no longer available anywhere (from the 60's,70's) they are lead tubes and toxic with pure cadmium etc. toxic metals. Can only get these through conservators because they collect them or old Babas who sell them from dead relatives. 

We are in  TURBULENCE now.  Things are starting to move.  This is a study I did in Ukraine.  I became obsessed with this look, vicious circle.  Kind of passive, bored, bruised but beautiful bruised look, a wound covered with make-up look. A kind of aggressive and depraved look still lingering from the Soviets but no one spoke about. And I started doing these composite portraits where I would instil these looks.  I did maybe 30 portraits but 9 of them ended up in the show.  Portraits of people that wouldn't normally come to my studio and let me paint them.  Shifty personalities.  Its about portraiture and about that depravity.  I don't know where I am going with this. This is how I work.  I don't know what I am going to do with these guys and they are lining up in my studio.  I am thinking about everything that I saw. 

One of the things I perceived in Ukraine is what I call this code of silence.  There were things that were unspoken. This country went from a Soviet state, a third world, to a first world without skipping a beat. There was no accountability for all that baggage I was raised with.  There was never any trial.  It seemed like everyone had this cultural amnesia.  Money and physical pleasures immediately took over.

So I thought I would paint a trial. Old women weigh you on the street in Ukraine.

You see it a lot.  For 12 cents you could get weighed. It is sort of archaic and quaint. It is a way for pensioners to make money. I photograph it because I don't know what it means. Then I get this idea that I am going to use that old woman as the judge.  As I work developing this judgement painting I take that old woman as the one with the longest memory and the least voice, she is weighing the sins of these thugs.  And the artist is in the form of nurse/stewardess. And here is  the young boy I gave the twenty dollars to.  JUDGEMENT NIGHT

I have a tradition of painting on book covers. I collect all these trashy books. There is one book I found that was written by a journalist in 1949. It has a very racy title, Why They Behave Like Russians.  I thought that I would paint on that title. Then I started painting on other book covers and they formed a poem. 

After a Trial you need a BANQUET.  My plot continues. I take the Seed Spitter girl going to a banquet.  At the banquet the has/been shows off, the nurse is her social conscience, the stewardess looks on.  

Natalka then shows us her 2 books, the catalogue from the touring show and the book she herself made and had printed in Ukraine.

Group OKWA Exhibit February 2012

Organization of Kingston Women Artists Group Exhibit

February 3rd to 24th 2012, The Wilson Room, Central Branch Public Library, 130 Johnson Street, Kingston, Ontario 

OPENING RECEPTION: February 4th, 5-7pm

from right: Jane Derby, Michele LaRose

From Left: Julie Withrow, Rebecca Cowan, Erika Olson

from left: Erika Olson, Su Sheedy, Terri Wing

from Left: June Anderson , Sally Milne

from left: Mary Crawford

from left: Rose Stewart, Zillah Loney, Michele LaRose

from left: Margaret Hughes, Lee-Ann Taras, Terri Wing

from left: Mieke van Geest, Peggy Morley, Pauline Conley, Margaret Hughes

from left: Rebecca Cowan, Mieke Van Geest, Peggy Morley

from left: Mary O'Brien, Peggy Morley, Mary Peppard

from right: Wendy Cain

from left: Mieke van Geest, Wendy Cain

from left: Mary Peppard, Margaret Hughes, Kathrine Christensen

Sue Lyon

above: Jane Thewell/below right: Lise Melhorn-Boe

bottom: diane black

from left: Sharon Thompson, Lee-Ann Taras, Su Sheedy

from right: Julie Withrow

Alana Kapell

ArtIgnite and OKWA Group Exhibit

The Organization of Kingston Women Artists Group Show celebrates ArtIgnite - Opening Event
The Wilson Room, Kingston Frontenac Public Library, 130 Johnson Street , 

Saturday, 4 February,  5 to 7pm
Show runs until Feb. 24, 2012

In conjunction with the OKWA exhibit there is a talk by Natalka Husar at Agnes Etherington Art Center on Sunday, February 5 at 2pm.

on Natalka Husar see http://www.ccca.ca/artists/artist_info.html?languagePref=en&link_id=1624&artist=Natalka+Husar

Workshop by Lise Melhorn-Boe

Sculptural Books

Learn to make artist's books with Lise Melhorn-Boe

This course will introduce participants to a variety of book structures, including accordions, sewn pamphlets, Japanese
stab bindings and the flashy-looking flag book. As well as learning the construction techniques, students will create
several books using their own material, learning about various ways to present that content, covering such concepts as
relationship between image and text, and movement through the book.

St. Lawrence College, Kingston

5 Wednesdays in February, 2012

Kingston Printmakers at Central Library

A group exhibition of woodcuts, etchings and monoprints:

June Anderson; Susan Beyette; Margaret Bignell

Wendy Cain; Barb Carr; Rebecca Cowan

Shirley Kalfin; Margaret Lock; Jenny Raymond

5-29 January 2012

Reception: 7 January, 2-4pm

Second floor foyer, Kingston Frontenac Public Library

Hours: Monday-Thursday 9am-9pm; Friday & Saturday 9am-5pm, Sunday 1-5pm

130 Johnson St.

613-549-8888

Salon Prize Winners

The Salon Prize (organized by Cleah Bunting) was held at Gallery Raymond on Nov. 18, 2011.  There were 20 finalists that included OKWA Members Sally Chupick, and Su Sheedy, with the $2000 1st Prize awarded to members Zillah Loney, and the $500 2nd Prize to Barb Carr.

Barb Carr

Zillah Loney

Swamp Ward Window Project by Matt Rogalsky

new exhibition

Flying V Down

a Swamp Ward Window project by Matt Rogalsky

dates: November 10 2011- January 15th, 2012

location: 448 Bagot St., Kingston, Ontario Canada

Flying V Down is a study for a larger work incorporating twenty

or more 'crashed' guitars, and is one of a series of pieces

by the artist that explore the history and culture of the electric

guitar.

Matt Rogalsky is an artist and musician based in Kingston,

Ontario. He performs and presents his solo electroacoustic

music and installations internationally, and plays electric guitar

with The Gertrudes, Canada's folkestra. Rogalsky teaches in

the School of Music at Queen's University.

The Swamp Ward Window is a venue for contemporary art initiatives in an

unconventional site in Kingston’s north end. It takes advantage of

pedestrian curiosity and the intimacy of a dense urban setting. Proposals

for projects are considered on an ongoing basis. Contact:

jocelyn.purdie@gmail.com.

ART TALKS October 26

ART TALKS started off this season with the topic of SOCIAL COMMENTARY presented thoughtfully by 3 artists: founder, Jocelyn Purdie, currently director of the Union Gallery and initiator of the Swamp Ward Window Gallery; printmaker, Rebecca Cowan; and Lise Melhorn-Boe.

The subject was inspired by Toronto artist, Natalka Husar, who will be OKWA's 2012 juror for the group show held at Kingston Public Library in February with an opening Saturday February 4, 2pm-4pm.  Natalka will also be speaking about her own work at Agnes Etherington at 2pm Sunday February 5.
    These talks were transcribed from presentations on Wednesday, October 26 at the Mansion in Kingston.

LISE MELHORN-BOE

Lise talks about her gender-related, older work.  For her "Breasts" book, she cut the cups out of a bra, put it on and had someone cast her breasts in plaster and then she was able to make paper casts from the mold.   The pages fit together and the text was rubber stamped onto the pages.  "Which was kind of tricky because of the forms.  The stories are collected from various women; at that time I was mainly talking to women that I knew about their breasts and how they felt about them. The one I liked the best was a woman who went to a convent boarding school in England and they

had to sleep with their hands crossed over their breasts so that the nuns could see that they weren't masturbating.

She attributes that to the fact that she has small breasts. They never got to grow.

 I did quite a few that were about women's impressions of their bodies.  I got a very high heeled pair of sandals and glued my foot to the sandal and had a friend cast it so that I was able to make shoes with toes and the insoles are the pages. There are eight pages in each shoe and they fit into a box.

"Leaky Stories".  These are sanitary napkins made out of paper.  At first I  used real ones. It's an edition of ten.  So I spent a day printing the whole page one ten times and put it aside and printed the next one.  And then for some reason when I was doing page three, I looked back and realized that they had done what they were

supposed to do and had absorbed all the print.  So I had to manufacture the pads.

I turned my eye to fashion magazines (actually women's magazines in general) because there are so many bizarre images.  This is called "Anything Can Happen: A Love Story".  It's a shuffle book with 26 cards with 52 images on both

sides. You can make up your own story.

 "Suitable for Success"  also uses images from the fashion magazines. The text running across the top of all the pages is from John T. Moyes book, "Dressed For Success", popular in the seventies. There were rules about what women should be wearing in a business situation. The text at the bottom is stories that I collected and mix and matched. The first image is a very sedate dress, almost like a wedding dress, but the woman's stance and gaze is a very come-hither look and it is repeated in all

the images. The last one is a woman in a corset with a machine gun and a pistol.  That one was from a Hustler magazine and it was amazing how much the same they were.

 Then I had a baby. I started looking at kid's stuff.  This was called "There Once Was a Little Girl and Boy."  This consists of life size baby garments made out of

handmade paper with real buttons and real lace. The rubber-stamped text pairs nursery rhymes about girls with those about boys. Similarly, "What are little girls/Boys Made of?" which was off-set litho printed in a large edition also has

similar rhymes.

"Tommy Trot a man of law

Sold his bed and lay upon straw

Sold the straw and slept on grass

To buy his wife a looking glass." is one of these. It's paired with:

"See Saw Marjorie Daw

Sold her bed and lay upon straw

Was not she a dirty slut

To sell her bed and lie in the dirt." 

This rhyme was actually in a Toronto library nursery rhyme book for kids.

 The next piece is called, "Good Girls Don't".  It is a tiny pop-up book. When I first moved to North Bay in 1990, I did a series of quilts and quilt related books that were using quilt patterns.  This is actually a SunBonnet Sue quilt pattern that has the Virgin Mary superimposed on it. The text on the quilt border is Good Girls Don't…all sort

of things.  "Someday" is  Marilyn Zimmerman's story—she was my professor at Wayne State where I did my master's degree. "Sometimes I would be playing with my daughter and she would designate me the prince and herself the princess

and I was to save her.  I would rebel and ask why do you have to be saved ,can't you save me instead? Trying to offset the internalization process of being female, meaning subordinate, weak and needful in a relationship. My strong, bright daughter of infinite potential being reduced to a stereotype at the age of three. This is the biggest personal

nightmare for any feminist professor mother.  I would soon buy her all the feminist versions of fairy tales, the Paper Bag Princess, etc.  but she would have nothing to do with it.  She has observed the world and noticed that boys were in charge. I do what I can but she is strong."

 This next image has very brief text from women who were abused as children in their homes.  The pattern, and the book itself, are called "Little House". This actually started as a quilt and then I later cut it up and made it into the house shape. It is all pink and cute but I was sitting on the train once working on it and someone said "What's that about" and I said "sexual abuse" and that ended the conversation.

  And then I started looking at what happened to the good girls when they grow up. I moved into looking at women's lives.  "Bound by Convention 2" consists of life sized 1/4 inch plywood gingerbread cookie cutouts.  This is the front cover.  All of them have pink rubber gloved hands that are sort of tied together in the back with their apron strings. One text reads, "I began editing myself, asking for approval of behaviour I had never needed approval for, of my habits, my daily life…checking myself.

He didn't ask me to do that. I did it even when I didn't want to. I constructed a wax doll for 18 years of marriage. It is a doll with no feelings. She's simply whatever he wants her to be.  I was really his creation, learning opera and chinese cooking. When he was out, I played Fleetwood Mac and ate ice cream.  When the wax doll became  suffocating, I began doing all sorts of things he didn't approve of, not cooking at all, taking tap dancing, and he felt betrayed. When I realized how many parts of myself had to be locked off to fit inside the doll mould, I panicked.  If I burned through it and become myself I would lose the relationship."

 Here's a story from the "Young Mother" page: "After months of having her sleep sliced and diced, a new mother develops a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome.  She can never quite relax because the call might come. If she goes to a party the sound of the phone ringing will act on her like one of those choking collars that dog trainers use. Instantly she will know that it is her sitter calling to insist that she stop having fun."

 Using the Little House patterns again, this one is stories of women who were abused by their partner. Although it is made out of paper it is all hand-stitched.

 "A Good Wife Wouldn't" is a tunnel book where you have the pages with holes in them so that you can look through the tunnel. There are accordions that hold the pages together. So the whole thing shrinks up. This has dirty dishes at the front and the light at the end of the tunnel is a dishwasher. "Why doesn't she just buy the god damned machine and have it delivered to the house? " The woman who told me this story is a lawyer, she couldn't understand this stay-at-home mother. But to me, it made sense. I could see it in my mother and unfortunately now I am beginning to see it in me too.

 The next piece is called "Ghost Costumes" . It is a large piece: there are eight replications of garments that my father wore and then eight that my mother wore. They go in 2 semi-circles and hang from the ceiling.  On my father's, they are all his work clothes ; he was an electrician. When I hang them the legs touch the ground so they don't move so much but my mother's are made of sheer fabric and they sway.  They are quite beautiful but very sad. They have text hanging from the crossbar of the hanger down inside the garment so it is a little difficult to read through the layers of the

garment. The text came from her journals. She had left 43 volumes of her journals when she died. They were both dead by this time, hence the "Ghost Costumes". The text reads,  "This is how I felt at 11:30 a.m., May 3, 1983.  I am surrounded by army ants who nibble at my time and disturb the mold of my life. Each night I lie in the dark and plan paintings , write poems and draft stories . In the morning they begin. Their chewing prebosicies take the form of telephone calls,  lost objects, loud voices, disturbing thoughts, incompetencies. I empty the garbage, prepare the noon meal, wash a few clothes, gnash my teeth. The poem is lost, the painting never reaches canvas or paper, the outline vanishes. Only left is a tiny pile of dry thoughts which crumble and blow away. My heart contracts, my muscles tighten, I choke fear." The poignancy of her text talking about things that she wanted to do, paintings that she

wanted to paint or writings that she wanted to do is a really good contrast to the photos of the actual installations of my father's that he accomplished and was very proud of. I was with him on his 77th birthday—he died before he reached his 78th—and he said , "I've accomplished everything that I wanted to do in life." But she didn't get to, like

many women.

REBECCA COWAN

"The topic is Social Commentary. I never think of my work that way, but maybe it is.

  I am going to show you some prints, a couple of books and some collages.

  The first three are from a suite of prints I did a long time ago.  8 prints called "Terms of Confinement" and they all have to do with family relationships and sibling rivalry. Images Inner Beauty, Mother and Child, Real/Ideal.

  In 1992 I got a scholarship to Open Studio in Toronto that gave me a year of free rent and an exhibition. To do that I had to present a good proposal of what I was going to do.  I had an idea that I was going to do two sets of prints to work together exploring the idea of beauty.  My plan was to do large dry point images of people with scars and then I was going to do small almost abstract images of the scar itself in colour.  This is a large drypoint 24 x 36". I had to find people with scars. Some people I knew and I also contacted a support group of people with facial deformities. 

  The models would come to my house. They would tell me about their scars and surgeries. I would do a bunch of drawings and then go into my studio and make a dry point. I started in September, but by December I hadn't got one image that I was happy with. I realized that though my concept sounded good it just was not right for me.  I couldn't make it work, because I kept making the scarred people too beautiful.   I was getting nervous because I had this exhibition that I was committed to and four months had gone by and there was nothing yet. So one day I was in the studio and I realized that I was the god of my own pictures. I could make the scars as big as I wanted. They could take up the whole picture frame if I wanted. 

  This one model had a neck injury that had several surgeries and the end result was that she couldn't lift her arms above shoulder height and she couldn't lift anything more than 15 lbs. so her life as a sculptor was over and she became a painter. So I tried to show that one door is closed but one door is open in the print.   

  One of the reasons my initial concept wouldn't work for me was that I just couldn't draw these people ugly. That seemed important because I was so moved by their spirits and their spirit of survival. Some of their stories were amazing.

  This is Jane who dances through the world as if there is no pain at all.  And Mildred who conquers her pain and becomes a healer. She has a little needle there to sew other people up. And Allen who knows how to put his pain away. David, who travels the world with his pain attached to him at all times unable to fit through the door to enlightenment. Sarah who lives with the shadow of child sexual abuse. Joe whose pain is all around him and he cannot escape. And Jenny who clings onto her pain/scars as if it were a loved one. 

  I finished this work and hung it in the gallery and stood in the middle of the room and was immediately overwhelmed about how sad it was.  Somehow when I was making them I didn't know they were sad. These were all people who had survived  and came out the other side.  The other reaction I had was that they felt almost like they were ten self portraits. I felt that I had to answer that series with work that looked at pleasure and happiness.

I felt that to really appreciate pleasure and happiness, you had to understand pain, so I decided to etch directly over the previous set of prints. Using those same etching plates I etched a new image directly on top. These are all found images. I used a xerox transfer technique to get the image onto the plate. The second image relates to the story of that person. Then I had the issue of titling these prints.  In prints the title is usually on the bottom, and the previous set I had just named them after the people. That was easy enough but I didn't want to call these, for instance, "David 2".  I struggled with that quite awhile and then I decided I would use newspaper headlines for the titles of this work.  I chose that because the headlines bring us back to the dark side.  This first one is called "Boy Found Unharmed"; "Tragedy Strikes Family on Way to Party".

  One of things that inspired me to do this is that when I was working on this print the story Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, was in the news. There was a big interview in the Globe and Mail with his father who talked about happy memories of fishing trips.

  This fellow was a childhood friend of mine. He was adopted when he was four. When his adopted parents got pregnant, every time he was bad they threatened to send him back to the orphanage which he could remember. When he was fourteen he built a bomb and tried to blow up his mother in the house. He ended up in reform school and jail and I don't know what has happened to him later.  When we were children my mother was the only parent that would allow him in the house. He was the "bad kid".  That's his story.  

  One of the most remarkable experiences I have had with my art is that I had this print at the Toronto Outdoor show and this biker guy was walking by. He walked right by and then he came back.  He said, " I know that guy. I was in prison with that guy."  He saw that from that image. So that was incredibly powerful for me. Especially from a person who doesn't look at art.

  This one is called "Mother of Aid's Patient".  

  People ask me about the titles alot.  I just felt they had to be there.

  I was lucky enough when I finished this second set of prints to have an exhibition with both sets of work hung side by side in their pairings and that was really satisfying. 

  In 1995 I had some of my work published in a literary journal and before they went to press the editor called me and asked, "What would you like us to write about these?". Just say that I want to collaborate with a poet.  The magazine came out and a month later a poet , Julie Pollack, got in touch with me

  A story captured our interest about a woman who was sentenced for killing another woman in prison. What made this story even more interesting is that the woman who died had been a heroin addict. She had had several strokes and needed considerable  care in prison. The woman who killed her had been one of the people giving her care. So there was a question of euthanasia.  Julie and I both found this story amazing but we didn't feel that we could deal with it directly.  We had never been to prison and didn't know that experience. So what we decided to do was to create a series of poems and images based on the seven deadly sins and seven cardinal virtues.  We used that story of the 2 women in prison as sort of a background story for us to use as a place to jump off of. 

  IMAGES: "Anger", "Fortitude", "Temperance", "Pride", "Gluttony", "Greed" "Envy", " Lust" "Justice".

   This collaboration with her was very remarkable.  We would get together every 2 or 3 weeks and do a show and tell. We worked on all of the images simultaneously. One of the most interesting things about it was how many images about these topics were common to both of us, the archetypes etc. 

  The finished book is 18 x 24" bound with metal. The poems are silk screened on transparent Japanese paper that is interleaving paper between the images. 7 copies were made in the edition with 2 artist proofs.

  So often you work within your comfort zone, pushing a little bit here and there. I wasn't sure  I could actually get this book bound. It really pushed me to the edge of  my capabilities which was wonderful. When I finished the first proof copy and it opened and laid flat and did everything that it was supposed to do, I just sat in my studio and cried. I just couldn't believe it had come together. 

  I had been wanting to do something about my sisters for quite some time (in my art). I couldn't get it right, and then my older sister turned fifty and had a big party out in Victoria and we all flew out.  She was  a complete bitch to us and we became kitchen slaves at her party. I had a kind of epiphany as I took myself to Starbucks to cool off. We don't get together much as adults. One of the things I realized was that we were still stuck in roles that our parents had given us.  We were still wearing them with each other and probably in other parts of our lives. That inspired another series of dry points: double plate images, there are two plates printed on top of each other. I used photo references and some of them are family pictures that I used. I was playing with the text as texture without any real theme. I thought about these labels that we all have, like the oldest, the flirt, the beauty.  "And Yes, She Really Is Bossy" . I was afraid to show her (my sister) that print for about ten years. This is "The Baby".  By overlapping them and making one more dominant than the other I was also trying to speak to how the way your parents' affection changes. When you are the oldest you have all the affection at the beginning because there was no one else. When you are the baby you take a lot of space too.  "The Flirt" and "The Beauty".

  COLLAGES: current work for the past two years. These are 8 x 10". I have been saving images of working women for a long time. I had been carrying this image of the girl reporter around for about 30 years. I just love the look of her and it was great to finally put her some where.  

JOCELYN PURDIE: The Swamp Ward Gallery on Bagot Street, Kingston

The Swamp Ward Gallery operates out of Jocelyn's front porch and front yard. The public does not come into the porch so the work has to be accessible from the street. There is a broad range of installations that have happened over the years, not just sculptural installations; there have been sound and performance pieces. 

   The first project was 2001. It has been going on for 10 years now. There have been over 20 projects and they usually stay up for 2 to 3 months.  Because this is something that I do on my own time I try to make it logistically possible. It comes out of interest in seeing contemporary art in public spaces.   I work in a gallery setting and as artists we all visit galleries to see art work but the general public doesn't necessarily do that and I think if there is any way to engage people to get them interested and aware of the kinds of things artists are doing outside the norm this is one way of doing it because they are actually encountering it in their day to day lives as they walk through the streets. I am also really interested in work that is temporary.  

   For this particular project which interestingly ties in with Lise and Rebecca's work of domestic and women's space, I wanted people to think about projects that would relate to the site, not necessarily the home but sensitive to the home, the neighbourhood and the community.  Most of the projects have some kind of tie into that."

    One of Jocelyn's own pieces, "Carapace" has a warm glow about it. "I was thinking about carapace which is sort of an armour or shell. Thinking about the home and womb-like soft feeling that emanated and also the shell that hides the reality of what often happens in the home to women. So it had this double edge to it.  There was a house full of guys that lived across the street, not young men, older guys. They sort of fell in love with it and were disappointed when it disappeared. They liked to smoke their cigarettes outside and watch. That was the first piece.

    I have presented the work of local artists as well as artists from out of town. This piece was by Montreal artist, Anne Ramsden.  This is called "Winter Garden".  She had earlier participated in the exhibition Museopathy where contemporary artists put works in museums throughout Kingston.  Anne did one down at Murney tower. Murney Tower was a place for soldiers and their wives to stay. They could live in there. She played with this idea and installed fake flowers on the outside around the tower in the garden area trying to bring out that domestic aspect of this fortification. This is a translation of that onto a domestic space.

In this installation, ‘FOR’, by Craig Leonard, the artist created a facsimile of a real estate sign exploring the idea of language and symbols.  People actually did stop to see if the house was for sale but I don't think the artist got any actual calls however. 

This one is done by two young artists who had just graduated from Queen's University. Julie Fiala and York Lethbridge created this piece, "Salvation", referencing the home and the idea of, "Is the home a place of refuge or violence?” This lit up at night.

    "Turbulent” is another piece I did with Jan Allen. This was a combination of installation and sound.  Behind a sheers curtain that was backlit, the sound of breaking dishes was projected from speakers onto the street, while a fan inside created constant movement of the curtain.

    Another piece we did together was "Continuous Colour" made from lipstick applied to the inside of the window.  

    Toronto artist Sarindar Dhaliwal did a piece, ‘Call the Wind Virago’, an archive of hurricanes.  For the piece she made 72 sets of multi-coloured curtains of Indian cotton, which were installed on each windowpane of the porch. In the opening between each curtain are a woman's name and a date that references the name of the hurricane and the year it occurred. 

    

This is a performance piece by Jan Allen called "Neighbourhood Watch" so it is playing on the idea of the neighbourhood watch. She constructed a platform that sat in the porch.  There was a day where there was a gathering of people where they could come and participate in the piece, sitting in the porch and be the neighbourhood watch. 

    This piece is by Thunder Bay artist Ann Clarke. She was the director of Modern Fuel for a short time. In 2006 she did this piece called "Random Courses" based on the old stone walls that were called random courses. With this in mind she used household product packaging, consumer products and constructed a wall from them.  

    "Blue Red Blue" is a poem, almost like a nursery rhyme. Artist Ted Rettig states, "The text is like a nursery rhyme that has a bit of an edge. It has a degree of innocence and playfulness but also contains an undercurrent of pain. The pronouns he/she is interchangeable. Two can mean an affirmation of the relationship of a couple or it can refer to a third person. " It was lit up at night.

    This was an installation from artist Mark Prier from Newfoundland whose work was about citizenship and borders. He set up a fake consulate to talk to people and issue passports.  He also set up a temporary consulate in Confederation Basin.

   In this installation, ‘Intruder’, artist Kathleen Sellars draws on a friend’s illness to create this tumour-like object, which would inflate and deflate over the course of the day.  

   

‘Passing’, is one of my pieces, which was inspired by a trip to Venice to a small cemetery island. The island was incredible; it was a sea of artificial flowers and cypress trees.  The piece consists of a blanket of white flowers that flowed out from the windows onto the lawn. 

    Dave Gordon did an installation titled “Inside’ of text on banners outside the porch based on his time spent teaching art in the prisons in Kingston For example one of the banners read, "Inmate seen participating in sexual activity during social. Visitor was seen with her hand inside his pants." It was interesting in peoples' responses.  

    The most recent piece ‘Settle’ was done by a graduate of Queen's Fine Arts Program as well.  This is an installation of chicken wire figures poised for running or settling. 

    How do people apply? I am in the process of developing a website but if people want to put in a proposal they can do so through  HYPERLINK "mailto:Jocelyn.purdie@gmail.com" Jocelyn.purdie@gmail.com.