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May 25, 2010

Nike Blanket 9 Miles from Nike Headquarters

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After 5 years of stitching and 2 years of touring the Nike Blanket Petition is in full view at the Museum of Contemporary Craft (MoCC) in Portland, Oregon - 9 miles from Nike Headquarters. The CEO Mark Parker has been invited and has politely agreed to visit the museum before June 11 - the last day to see the swoosh. It will continue to show at MoCC during the exhibition Gestures of Resistance (through June 26); however, after June 11 it will be in the Study Center looking like Nana's afghan folded on her sofa. Museum admission is $3, $2 for students. Please contact me if you participated and intend to visit -- make it before June 11th!

Also on view is the work by: Sara Black And John Preus, Anthea Black, Carole Lung, Mung Lar Lam, Ehren Tool and Theaster Gates, curated by Shannon Stratton and Judith Leeman. A new installation called Fiber Alliance (images below) was created during my brief residency last week, cut short due to my 19th century pregnancy.

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Setting up a process by which knitted cast-offs of American brands are unmade - unraveled and spun into new balls of yarn.

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Pictured here is 3 Gap Inc. sweaters unraveled and recreated into knitted textiles. The motifs created on the knitting machine are made with the freeware knitPro, sampling patterns that have origin in the country where the labor was exported. In this case, the light & bright blue sweaters were made in Bangledesh and the new people pattern was sampled from a kantha. The chartreuse yarn was from an Old Navy sweater made in Thailand. The Thai pattern stitched in green traditionally means "Bird's Wings".

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The unraveled yarn on the world map connects the brand headquarters to the country where the product was manufactured.

Posted by cat at 03:30 PM

May 09, 2010

The Mill Series at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art

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Photo credit: Kathryn Hetzner

San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art
560 South First Street
San Jose, CA

The Mill Series is a two channel video of animated woven swatches sourcing footage of American textile mills built during early industrial capitalism. It is up for one last week (Feb 6 - May 15) as an evening projection concurrent with the exhibition By A Thread. Read more here and here.

Posted by cat at 10:03 AM