Photo Kira Perov/©Bill Viola Studio
Art
3 books about art crafting to weave into your life
![A collage of 3 book covers on blue, red and pink backdrops next to a smiling brown-haired woman wearing a black blazer in front of a teal background.](https://i.cbc.ca/1.7093598.1706128428!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_780/jana-o-connor.jpg)
The Next Chapter12:58Thread of connection: Jana O’Connor recommends three crafting books
Despite a busy schedule as a frequent contributor on CBC Radio’s Because News and the executive director of nonfiction festival LitFest Alberta, Edmonton’s Jana O’Connor somehow manages to sustain a life-long love of crafting.
“There was always a lot of materials around our house. I was always inspired by that,” she told Ali Hassan. “But it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s and I just caught a fire in me to decide to learn to knit.”
On this week’s episode of The Next Chapter, O’Connor shares three nonfiction titles that have greatly influenced her relationship with crafting and her appreciation of the art.
![A smiling woman with short hair and glasses, the book cover with a illustration of pink lungs and another woman with long dark hair and black rimmed glasses](https://i.cbc.ca/1.6943945.1692874448!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_780/sharp-notions-by-marita-dachsel-and-nancy-lee.jpg)
This nonfiction essay anthology brings together crafters from all walks of life. From crochet and knitting to embroidery, beading and quilting, these artists explore their relationship with fibre arts as it intersects with identity, trauma, politics, technology, climate change, disability and chronic illness.
Marita Dachsel is the author of the poetry collections There Are Not Enough Sad Songs, Glossolalia and All Things Said & Done, and the play Initiation Trilogy. Her essays have appeared in multiple anthologies. She is an assistant teaching professor in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.
Nancy Lee is the author of two works of fiction, Dead Girls and The Age and a poetry collection, What Hurts Going Down. She is an associate professor at the UBC School of Creative Writing and co-creator of the internationally acclaimed EdX education series, How to Write a Novel. She lives in Vancouver.
Jana O’Connor says: “It’s an absolutely beautiful book and has a myriad of different perspectives on people’s lives and their relationship to needlework. It brings all kinds of insight and thoughtful reflections on the role of craft in people’s lives.”
Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti by Leanne Prain and Mandy Moore
![a book cover of the Charging Bull statue covered in blue, pink and purple yarn on a blurred background next to the title and authors](https://i.cbc.ca/1.7093615.1706128645!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_780/yarn-bombing.jpg)
Yarn bombing, the international guerilla movement using textile art as an act of political resistance, first picked up steam in the early 2000s. The 10th anniversary edition of Yarn Bombing was published in 2019 and includes patterns, tips and infamous examples of the movement over the previous decade.
Leanne Prain is a writer, speaker and certified design professional from Vancouver who helps communities connect through creative ideas. Her previous books include Strange Material: Storytelling through Textiles and The Creative Instigator’s Handbook: A DIY Guide to Making Social Change through Art.
Mandy Moore has worked in the yarn industry for over two decades as a teacher, designer and technical editor. She lives and works in Vancouver.
Jana O’Connor says: “Yarn graffiti and craftivism are very exciting ways of inserting yourself gently into the both political and municipal landscape and just making your mark.”
Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein
![A blue book cover featuring the head of a sheep next to a woman with curly blonde hair and glasses looking at the camera.](https://i.cbc.ca/1.7093609.1706128665!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_780/peggy-orenstein-unraveling.jpg)
In order to cope with immense family upheaval amidst the COVID pandemic, Unraveling details author Peggy Orenstein’s journey to create a sweater entirely from scratch. From shearing a sheep to dyeing and knitting the yarn, Orenstein undertook every element of the year-long process herself in this hilarious, poignant memoir.
Peggy Orenstein is New York Times bestselling author, whose other books include Boys & Sex, Don’t Call Me Princess, Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Waiting for Daisy. She is a frequent contributor to publications such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the New York Times and the Washington Post. She lives in North Carolina.
Jana O’Connor says: “This memoir is really beautiful, intimate and funny.”
Comments have been edited for length and clarity.
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Art
Ehiko: The Multidisciplinary Artist Shaping Decolonization Through Art
Art
Home + Away artwork opens in Vancouver’s Hastings Park
A new art installation now towers over Vancouver’s Hastings Park fields in celebration of the city’s history of spectators and sports.
Home + Away is a sculpture by Seattle artists Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio, which opened Monday in the southeast end of the historic park.
![A tall bleacher-like structure](https://vancouver.citynews.ca/wp-content/blogs.dir/sites/9/2024/07/16/Hastings-Park-Art-Installation-Home-Away-Stair-Stairwell-to-nowhere-2-1024x576.jpg)
![A tall bleacher-like structure](https://vancouver.citynews.ca/wp-content/blogs.dir/sites/9/2024/07/16/Hastings-Park-Art-Installation-Home-Away-Stair-Stairwell-to-nowhere-1024x576.jpg)
![A tall bleacher-like structure](https://vancouver.citynews.ca/wp-content/blogs.dir/sites/9/2024/07/16/Hastings-Park-Art-Installation-Home-Away-Stair-Stairwell-to-nowhere-4-1024x576.jpg)
Open Gallery
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It’s a 17-metre-tall structure that resembles a narrow set of bleachers — similar to the stands of the Empire Stadium, which stood on the site of the park from 1954 to 1993 and hosted The Beatles, among many others. It recalls a covered ski jump that stood there in the 1950s and the nearby wooden rollercoaster at the PNE.
The city says the public is invited to walk the stairs and sit on the benches.
“In addition to being visually striking, this artwork is intended to be ascended, sat on and experienced. It offers exciting experiences of height and views and provides 16 rows of seating for up to 49 people, making for a unique spectator experience when watching events at Empire Fields,” the city said in a release Monday.
The idea for the park to include public art was outlined in the Hastings Park “Master Plan,” first adopted by the city in 2010. The city says Han and Mihalyo first presented their design in 2015.
“It’s wonderful to see this piece realized within the context of such a well-used public space,” said Han.
“Home + Away was inspired directly by the site history of spectatorship, and we hope it will connect Hastings Park users to that history and the majestic views of the environment for many decades to come,” added Mihalyo.
The artwork features a large light-up sign, in the style of a sports scoreboard, that reads “HOME” and “AWAY.”
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Art
Bill Viola, Video Artist Who Established the Medium as an Integral Part of Contemporary Art, Dies at 73
Bill Viola, whose decades-long engagement with video proved vital in establishing the medium as an integral part of contemporary art, died on July 12 at his home in Long Beach, California. He was at 73 years old. The cause was complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. The news of his passing was confirmed by James Cohan Gallery.
Viola’s works are centered around the idea of human consciousness and such fundamental experiences as birth, death, and spirituality. He delved into mystical traditions from Zen Buddhism to Islamic Sufism, as well as Western devotional art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in his videos, which often juxtaposed themes of life and death, light and dark, noise and silence. These explorations were achieved by submerging viewers in both image and sound with cutting-edge technologies for their time.
“I first used the camera and lens as a surrogate eye, to bring things closer, or to magnify them, to experiment with perception, to extend vision and make lengthy observations of simple objects,” Viola said in a 2015 interview. “Once you do that, their essence becomes visible. So I suppose I was always interested in the inner life of the world around me.”
Beginning in the 1970s, Viola created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast—all of which expanded the scope of the medium and established Viola as one of its most notable practitioner.
Bill Viola was born in 1951. He grew up in Queens and Westbury, New York, and attended P.S. 20 in Flushing, before receiving his BFA in experimental studios from Syracuse University in 1973. There, he studied with visual art with the likes of Jack Nelson and electronic music with Franklin Morris.
Following his graduation, between 1973 to 1980, Viola studied and performed with composer David Tudor in the music group Rainforest, which later became known as Composers Inside Electronics. He also worked as technical director at the pioneering video studio Art/tapes/22 in Florence, Italy from 1974 to 1976. During that time he encountered the work of other seminal video artists like Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci.
Viola was subsequently an artist-in-residence at New York’s WNET Thirteen Television Laboratory between 1976 to 1983, wherein he created a series of works that premiered on television. He traveled to the Solomon Islands, Java, and Indonesia to record traditional performing arts between 1976 and 1977. Later that year, Viola was invited to show work at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, by cultural arts director Kira Perov, with whom he married and began a lifelong collaboration.
He was appointed an instructor in advanced video at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1983. He was the Getty Research Institute scholar-in-residence in Los Angeles in 1998 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.
In 1985, Viola received with a Guggenheim Fellowship for fine arts, and later that decade, in 1989, he was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. His work was also featured in some of the world’s most notable exhibitions, including Documenta VI in 1977, Documenta XI in 1992, the 1987 and 1993 editions of the Whitney Biennial, and the 2001 Venice Biennale.
In 1995, he represented the United States at the 46th edition of the Venice Biennale. For the pavilion, Viola produced the series of works “Buried Secrets,” including one of his most known works The Greeting, which offers a contemporary interpretation of Pontormo’s oil painting The Visitation (ca.1528–30). The Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and New York’s Guggenheim Museum commissioned the digital fresco cycle in high-definition video, titled Going Forth By Day, in 2002.
Viola’s work was the subject of a major 25-year survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997, which subsequently toured internationally. His work has been the subject of major museum retrospectives in the years since, including at the Grand Palais in Paris (in 2014), the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (2017), the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain (2017), and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (2019), as well as an exhibition pairing his work with that of Michelangelo at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019.
Viola is survived by his wife Kira Perov, who has been the executive director of his studio since 1978, and their two children.
“One thing that’s very exciting about video that has turned me on since I first saw this glowing image way back in 1970 is that it can be so much,” Viola said in a 1995 with Charlie Rose on the occasion of this US Pavilion at the Biennale. “Furthermore, what’s really exciting is I don’t think it’s been since really the Renaissance where artists have been able to use a medium that one could say is the dominant communication form in society.”
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