She Wore Gold

A poem I wrote circa 2004 or so.

Found posted to the internet on some nondescript website.

PLAIN

The search for something that resonates within my core,

the search for something inside myself

that sings a song to my soul

dreams, forgiveness, language,

the abstract,

renders my heart to soar

dancing on clouds

singing in a choir

loving unconditionally

is my quest in truth

The search continues…

for life is found when a smile appears,

life is found when tremendous simplicity is adhered to

The search continues…

within my soul a triumph of will is found,

within my soul a triumph of strength exists,

within my soul a triumph of spirit remains. 

**Please Share*** Repost and view the site to see how you can help! 

Britta Fluevog, is involved in a tea project and they really need some help getting the word out. 

They just launched a crowdfunding campaign for JusTea. They are hoping to start a partnership in Kenya to teach tea farmers how to process hand roasted tea. Kenya is the world’s largest exporter of black tea. About half the farms are small family owned tea farms. Currently all tea in Kenya, must, by default, be processed in large industrial factories. The farmers only receive about 1% of what the consumer pays. This leaves the farmers in poverty and without a voice to change their circumstances. JusTea is partnering with Kenyan tea farmers to remove the middle men, give power to the farmers and to make beautifully hand crafted tea.
Please have a look at their campaign and see if you like the project. I hope you can post the link to the project on your social networks and would consider trying to get some of your friends to do the same.

Click the image to be directed to their website!! www.justea.com

Their indigogo campaign is here! http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/justea

Okay my darling friends, and you!! Finally!!! able to focus entirely on my upcoming exhibition! Join the event page here to find out all about it and please share, share, share!!https://www.facebook.com/events/140767759428424/ I will be having an online component to it as well so even if you cannot make it to London you can still see it! Every couple of days I post something that relates to the show or inspires me to keep going with it! lots of loves!! xoxo

Exhibition Featuring: 
Ana Čop, Dana Brushette, Kerstin Maciuk, Paddy Jane 
and The Archives of Judith Purdy in Discourse 
with The History of Women’s work, Trials and 
The Hosiery Mills of London, Ontario

A Publication To 
Accompany The 
Exhibit With contributions 
by Special Guest Writer 
Kimberly Barton


Women, Freedom and Hosiery “When I put on my own silk stockings, then I knew I was free.”[1]


Exhibition Featuring: 
Ana Čop, Dana Brushette, Kerstin Maciuk, Paddy Jane 
and The Archives of Judith Purdy in Discourse 
with The History of Women’s work, Trials and 
The Hosiery Mills of London, Ontario

A Publication To 
Accompany The 
Exhibit With contributions 
by Special Guest Writer 
Kimberly Barton


Women, Freedom and Hosiery “When I put on my own silk stockings, then I knew I was free.”[1]



Inspired by the brand new course, What (Not) To Wear I VAH 2235F offered by the Department of Visual Arts at Western University with Professor Kirsty Robertson and the assistance of T.A. Julia Krueger; Women, Freedom and Hosiery will be a multi-faceted exhibition juxtaposing three separate histories of women’s work, expression and identity within the hosiery and entertainment industries over the past 100 years.

London Ontario was once home to five hosiery mills, The Holeproof Hosiery Mill, 1911, The London Hosiery Mill LTD, 1915 and Penman’s LTD, 1919.[2] Richmond Hosiery and Young women, preferred for their dexterity and strong work ethic, kept the hosiery mills of Ontario operating. Some of these preferred female workers arrived at the mills as a result of revisions to the Female Refuges Act of Ontario, which enabled the conviction of women on the grounds of immoral behavior and sentenced them to hosiery mill work. Women as young as 14 described as displaying deviance and seemingly rejecting authority faced this lawful incarceration. The act therefore legally bound young women, who were doing little more than discovering their individual and perceived sexual identity, to work in the mills. During this same time, Mary Prevost moved from Sarnia, Ontario to Hollywood to work as a silent film “bathing beauty” actress while other women of the era appeared in arcade girly cards treasured by among others, World War 1 servicemen.

The exhibition Women Freedom and Hosiery will juxtapose the deviant female imagery of the time with a didactic history of the Female Refuges Act of Ontario and the work of contemporary artists working in London, Ontario today within the vein of the “Bad Girl/Good Girl” pin-up oeuvre. Three main goals will be accomplished: 1) to shed light on the poor working conditions of young women incarcerated for presenting a sexualized identity in the early twentieth century, 2) to remember the women who, beyond all perceived good moral judgment, created careers for themselves within this identifiable imagery and 3) to showcase that was once considered immoral is now an empowered female imagery for women in the twenty-first century.

The Exhibition will be held at the DB Weldon Library in the Spencer Gallery and will consist of a publication, contemporary imagery by artists Dana Brushette http://www.danabrushette.com/, Ana Cop https://www.facebook.com/AnaCop.artist/photos_stream and painter Kerstin Maciuk, and original and/or reproduced Arcade Cards/Posters from the early twentieth century (primarily from the archival collection of Ms. Judith Purdy) and images of Mary Prevost during her career as a Hollywood silent film star. The Catalogue will include four essays, one of which will be written by a guest writer, and fellow Art History student Kimberly Barton. The topics included within the catalogue will be: The history of the hosiery mills of London, Ontario, A short history of Marie Prevost, The history of the arcade card and how it evolved into the Pin-up imagery of the 1950s and the nature of the Female Refuges Act of Ontario, Women’s Identity Then and Now.

Further, a portion of the exhibition will also be housed in the display cases next to the circulation desk. featuring a late addition to the catalogue and exhibit! 

Paddy Brown Paddy Jane’s Grandmother was a Cabaret performer, model and silver screen actress during the period of the early 1900s. Moved to Chatham, Ontario in the 1950s and begun a a professional theater there. Here she is in a poetic and comedic broadcast talking of male stars of the era sporting women’s clothes. http://www.britishpathe.com/video/paddy-browne/query/theatre I will be including her story in the display along with a lil’ story about Paddy’s relationship with her Grandmother and how she inspired her own art. I absolutely love this story. And speaks to the issue of immigration of women to Canada and how their strength played a key role in our country. You can follow Paddy Jane’s radio show’s facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/outlawsrock

The exhibition will provide a dynamic introduction into the creative possibilities of studying art history, a discussion and demonstration of what is possible if you have a passion about a small class assignment and how it can grow into an independent study, and a demonstration of options available to Students during their undergraduate degree. Women Freedom and Hosiery also offers an interesting history of empowerment for young women, embarking upon their own life purpose. A lesson on the pains women have endured in Ontario and how they sought to overcome these issues by education, strong leadership and positivity will be beneficial to many different students in search of their own identity. And last but not least, one will find a fun, entertaining and educational exhibit featuring current pop culture and discussion of how the imagery we see in music videos, on social media or within Hollywood Glam identities became what it is today.

Jennifer Lorraine Fraser

Essay for:

VAH 2242G – HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Professor Sarah Bassnett

List of Figures:

Danny Lyon. Drinking Fountains in the Dougherty County Courthouse. Albany, Georgia. 1963.

Charles Moore/Black Star. Police Dog Attack. Birmingham, Alabama. May 3, 1963.

Bob Adelman/Magnum. Martin Luther King, Jr., Delivering his “I have a dream” speech.

Washington, D.C. August 28, 1963.

Fraser, Jennifer Lorraine. Imaginary Life. 2013.

The purpose of this paper is to document the uprising of the civil rights movement in 1963 through the lens of photojournalism. We have been asked to imagine that we are the editors of Life Magazine for this era, and to choose one of three images to place on the cover, so as to allow it to speak to the essential issues of the period in question. The images are: 1. Danny Lyon’s Drinking Fountains in the Dougherty County Courthouse, 2. Charles Moore/Black Star’s Police Dog Attack, and 3. Bob Adelman/Magnum’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Delivering his “I have a dream” speech, Washington.

The essay will be broken into three main sections: (a) a brief history of Life Magazine and its purpose in making “a mosaic out of fragmentary documents with pictures past and present,” together with an explanation on the nature of photojournalism, as well as a discussion of the civil rights movement and how it was portrayed to the white communities in America; (b) a brief section describing the photographic works chosen; and (c) my argument that placing Danny Lyon’s image on the cover might have allowed Life’s readers to have a more grounded, empirical judgement about the situation, instead of merely exciting an immediate, emotional response. To conclude, I will offer an exercise to the reader of placing oneself in a situation to give perspective to consider events which are occurring now.

Life Magazine began partly in response to the separation of the American elite and lower classes: it was intended to document the strengths and trials of Americans succumbing to the depression of the 1930s, and to present social contracts for everyday Americans hoping for change. Henry Robinson Luce created Life as an answer to his other two publications – Time and Fortune – whose agendas were to cater to the economic and political interests of the American upper class. Luce’s vision for Life was to reshape the perception that many Americans had of their own country, offering “an historical vision that entertained, informed and influenced millions.” Begun on November 23, 1936, Life was key in shaping contemporary American society through its photographic stories depicting the everyday. Luce hoped that it would focus on three topics, “machines, strange things, and the women that men love and many children.” Through the 1960’s, Life influenced the understanding of over 20 million, predominantly white Americans, about the mass cultural struggle which was the civil rights movement. Through the tropes of photojournalism, and its claim to offer a purely objective vision of the world and its various issues, Life magazine helped to instigate a public discourse into what was actually at the heart of the matter. However, as with anything visual, there were many other factors at play which subjectified the individual agenda of the magazine. Naïve to the critical account of the ideology of the gaze – which would only come in later years with Feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey – Life’s readers would read the text and imagery uncritically according to the narrative that the publication had intended to present. By utilizing “a variety of formal visual strategies – point of view, composition – to align the viewer’s gaze with that of the camera’s and/or subject’s,” Life projected a homogenised and softer vision of the experiences of the segregated, destructive, and extremely violent South. That is, while Life attempted to present the issues surrounding race relations in the South, it did so tiptoeing around the destruction in order to please the white readership. Though the magazine created a spectacular and morally moving argument in favour of the civil rights movement, there were still fundamental issues that they left untouched. For, the civil rights movement was not the work of a single united organisation. Rather, it comprised several, ideologically distinct sub-movements.

The program which wielded the greatest effect on white Americans was the Christian non-violence prescribed by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. This is because it was not a violently defensive strategy, instead relying heavily on direct appeals to the hearts and moral codes of white America. The images by Charles Moore and Bob Alderman (figures 2 and 3) depict this sub-movement. King had petitioned parents of the children of Alabama to allow them to conduct their own non-violent protest. This resulted in gross white brutality against the children, who were all imprisoned. With his words from Birmingham Jail, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” King described his outrage and purpose eloquently. However, it was also a deliberate move to try to evoke strong emotions in the white population. This appeal was aided through the publication of the devastating images of the protests. Further, in giving his “I Have a Dream Speech”, King evoked compassion for the plight of African Americans, positioning himself as a leader to justice which would be achieved by integrating African Americans into white systems. The images published of this speech show the ideological commitment of the Christian movement to non-violence, elevating King’s call to non-violent action into the national public discourse. His persuasion and strength was necessary to achieve the aims of the civil rights movement and eventually resulted in the signing of the Civil Rights Act. It is believed that the images of King taken by Moore were key in initiating this signing and “credit is given for helping to influence this passage.”

The other main sub-movement was instigated by The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee led by Stokely Carmichael, of which Danny Lyon was a part of between 1962-1964. By contrast to King’s Christian non-violence, this was a more aggressively political movement that attempted to educate the American public on the true, underlying issues underlying the Civil Rights Movement. Carmichael’s speech to the students of Berkley was presented with such power and simplicity that it would have been difficult to deny his words – his main priority was not to “fight for the right to integrate – but fighting against white supremacy.” Through tackling the racist ideology of white-run institutions, Carmichael made a plea to whites and blacks alike to help tear down these institutions in order to make an even playing field for all. The SNCC’s critique started with the abstracted notion of how people move around these institutions, and other public spaces. Lyon’s image of the water fountains is a great visual example of this. In the modern age, most people move around a constructed environment, and this environment in the American south in 1963 was constructed entirely by white people, entirely delegating how the space was to be utilized. The main question for Carmichael and his congregation was not how to insert the black person into a white world, but how to tear down the constructed environments – physical, institutional, and empirical – so as to build a new and completely free society for everyone. He asked, “How do we begin to move? How do we begin to clear away the obstacles? How can we begin to build institutions that will allow people to relate to each other as human beings?” Lyon’s composition of the two water fountains shows the whites’ large and demanding and the blacks’ smaller, in a sharply pointed corner and only accessible if there was not a person using the other one. Even to my small body, that fountain looks tremendously uncomfortable to use. Water is a basic necessity for all human life, yet within this institution it is portrayed as something that the whites, who built it, had allowed for blacks. The sharp contrasts of tone within the image present this affecting idea of discomfort, dramatically and powerfully. The image encourages one to stop and really take in what is being presented. It encourages more discussion and action than the cut and dry information given within the other images discussed, regardless of how heartbreaking they are. Moore’s and Alderman’s images present an idea and conclude it at the same time; the image by Lyon presents the idea and more forcefully encourages pause upon the questions it raises. If I would have been the editor of Life, I would have chosen all three images and stories to be placed inside the magazine, but on the cover the image of the water fountains provokes discussion and I believe that this was what was needed back in 1963.

Revisiting the civil rights movement of the 1960’s in the year 2013 is still as heartbreaking and powerful as one imagines it to have been during the period of highest struggle. Questioning how the period should be documented and remembered raises many questions that still remained unanswered. For, certainly, such extremely overt racism as it was experienced during at that time is no longer at the forefront of American consciousness. However, every day acts of violence are still committed against black people, because of their race. The fight for a just livelihood is still prevalent, yet it has been masked by social poverty and inner-community conflicts – as we’ve recently borne witness to with the mass amount of shootings in Chicago, the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin last year, and most recently, the police slaughter and execution of 16 year old Kimani Gray in Brooklyn this past Saturday March 9 2013. African American people in the United States to this day live subject to a brutal and pervasive white power, a product of their group’s entire history in North America. I believe the civil rights movement was crucial to getting to where we are today but so much more needs to be done – and quickly. Perhaps, we should follow Carmichael’s plea to revisit the notion of movement in the communities of North America, to really see why and how they have been constructed, and to tear them down and build anew.

Figure 1. 

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 4

Bibliography:

Berger, Maurice. Photography Changes the Struggle for Racial Justice, Smithsonian Photograhy Institute. On line http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=29 accessed March 14 2013

Carmichael, Stokely. At U.C Berkley: Black Power, Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFFWTsUqEaY accessed March 15 2013

Doss, Erika. Introduction: Looking At Life: Rethinking America’s Favorite Magazine, 1936-1972 in Looking at Life Magazine ed. Erika Doss Smithsonian Institution Press Washington and London, 2001 p. 2

Doss, Erika. Visualizing Black America: Gordon Parks at Life, 1948-1971 in Looking at Life Magazine ed. Erika Doss Smithsonian Institution Press Washington and London, 2001

Helmore, Edward. Danny Lyon: ‘I put myself through an ordeal in order to create something’ The great photographer, famous for documenting the civil rights struggle and riding with bikers in the 60s, grants a rare interview Guardian.co.uk May 15 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/15/danny-lyon-interview-photography accessed March 14 2013

Kaplan, John. 1999. “The Life Magazine Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore 1958-1965.” Journalism History 25, no. 4: 126. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/ehost/detail?sid=18a8de8b-4bfb-4468-8eae-161b43eb07d2%40sessionmgr111&vid=6&hid=103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=ahl&AN=3338333accessed March 14 2013

King, Martin Luther, jr. Letter From a Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963 http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html accessed March 14 2013

Kozol, Wendy. Gazing at Race in The Pages of Life: Picturing Segregation through Theory and History in Looking at Life Magazine ed. Erika Doss Smithsonian Institution Press Washington and London, 2001

Lyford, Amy and Carol Payne. Photojournalism, Mass Media and the Politics of Spectacle Visual Resources (June 2005), 21 (2), pg. 119-129 http://journals1.scholarsportal.info.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/tmp/10772757409912671234.pdf accessed March 14 2013

Shwarz, Bill. ‘Our Unadmitted Sorrow’: the Rhetorics of Civil Rights Photography

History Workshop Journal (October 2011), 72 (1), pg. 138-155 http://journals1.scholarsportal.info.proxy2.lib.uwo.ca/details-sfx.xqy?uri=/13633554/v72i0001/138_ustrocrp.xml accessed march 14 2013

Smith, Terry. Life-Style Modernity: Making Modern America in Looking at Life Magazine ed. Erika Doss Smithsonian Institution Press Washington and London, 2001

 Footnotes:

http://issuu.com/jenniferlorrainefraser/docs/a_book_of_titles_/1

An Intern Abroad:

image by: Larsey McQuiggan from James Kirkpatrick’s facebook page.

Kim the Intern Reviews James Kirkpatrick’s “Pop’n Chips” Exhibition at the Michael Gibson Gallery - Originally posted the Art Lab Gallery’s Facebook Page.

This past November, the Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Ontario’s downtown core had the pleasure of featuring local artist James Kirkpatrick’s multi-media based show Pop’n Chips. Kirkpatrick is already well known in the area for his work in the Canadian graffiti movement, as well as his performances in hip-hop under the pseudonym Thesis Sahib. Stylistically, the show undoubtedly pointed to Kirkpatrick as its creator, with the artist’s familiar graphic applications of paint to various object surfaces, and his characteristic employment of an assortment of media, form, and color. 

The title of the show offers some insight into the practices currently explored by the artist, who is already well established in mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, zine-making and experimental sound installation. Pop’n Chips refers to an inside joke of the artist’s, belonging to the lexicon of the circuit bending community. For example, if asked what he might do for an evening’s entertainment, the artist might reply, “Oh, you know, pop’n chips.” The exhibition is primarily structured around these sound sculptures and experimental instruments that explore the terrain of circuit bending and building. For those unfamiliar with the terms, most simply circuit bending refers to the discovering of how a mechanism works and changing it, while circuit building uses an object of known design like a light timer, and makes it into something new, for instance productive of a noise or tone.

Works like Wheel (2012) and A Hat to the Sun (2012) use these circuit bent electronics which are imbedded within amorphous fiberglass encasements, fusing sound and three dimensional sculpture. Taking this a step further, Kirkpatrick employs two dimensional pixilated aesthetics in his work A Gold Coin for Each One of Them (2012), a structure reminiscent of the video arcades one may have once frequented in youth. The 32 x 32 pixel screen offers 16 different configurations, which change and vibrate differently, sometimes quite spastically, according to the applications of frequency applied by the viewer. The intention with many of the works exhibited by Kirkpatrick is participatory. The viewer is meant to engage with the objects, to play with them, as they are encouraged to respond by making their own aesthetic and aural judgments in using and exploring how the mechanisms work. No two viewers create the same effects, or are affected the same. 

Indeed, the sense of play at work in the exhibition underlies not only the relationship created with the viewer, but is also integral to understanding the drive of the artist in creating these works. During an artist talk at the gallery on November 24, 2012, Kirkpatrick reflected on his childhood briefly, a time when the desire to make art was not just an impulse, but something that was fun- a morning of art making might be accompanied by watching beloved cartoons. This reference to childhood takes material form in employing children’s toys in his Brain series of auaral/visual objects, or in appropriating images from children’s books for his Goon series. Images taken from storybooks are manipulated in photoshop, where the artist’s sense of play allows to randomness and accidents to affect and become part of the finished work. These images, which are then applied to masonite, are configured into strange anthropomorphic compositions, becoming fantastic objects of playful imagination.

In an art world where we are constantly under the pressure of the institution to remain at a distance and instructed not to touch, it is refreshing to see art approached in this way. Things normally taken for granted, like the circuits that exist in nearly every facet of modern life, are probed and investigated in a tactile way that activates both artist and viewer. This vividly colorful show, its lights, sounds and configurations return the viewer to a childlike state of basic human curiosity. We desire to explore how these mechanisms work, and our engagement comes to be realized through the act of play.

Britta Fluevog is an emerging artist based out of Vancouver, British Columbia. Fluevog is also an activist associated with Vancouver’s Downtown East Side Neighborhood Council and Strings of Justice advocating for poverty, low-cost housing initiatives and other environmental concerns.[1] Fluevog creates works that speak to the nature of gender and class inequality, displacement, collective and individual memory and the history of discourse on craft vs. fine art.[2]

Fluevog studied at NSCAD, and gained a tremendous passion for weaving during her time there. Weaving, a topic that can be described metaphorically in how we can weave collective histories and individual lives into the fabric of our common understanding in how the world functions; and weaving, in the actual act of creating a piece of fabric to clothe, embellish, and wrap around our bodies to shelter us from weather. Fluevog describes her use of textiles, “everyone has an emotional connection to textiles, either past or present. It is something familiar and personal;”[3] in the same vein she shares how Ghandi also wove his own clothing. Weaving and the creation of textiles are very much a key to the fabric of how life is lived, and Fluevog incorporates this understanding into her work.

We can see throughout the western world, or the North American landscape, that the use of fabric has taken on a new resurgence in art by way of anonymous yarn bombing, collective quilting projects and other large scale projects that speak to the nature of fabric as a metaphor for political protection. Fluevog also uses fabric as such, however, she varies in two ways, in that she doesn’t necessarily focus on the materiality of the issue but on the overarching art historical challenge between fine art and craft, “I will differentiate between art and craft, but my definition is not material based. The shortened form is that craft is an artform where the intention of the work is achievement of good craftsmanship; Art is where the main attention is something other than craftsmanship.”[4] And two, her interest in weaving is more on an inter-personal, or individual exploration as a metaphor for life; “It involves two (at least) separate entities that interlock to create a new whole. But the thing with weaving is that the two entities still remain separate (unlike items in a cookie recipe). I use this idea to create duality’s: masculine and feminine, industrial and domestic, chaos vs ordered.”[5] 

When I came across Fluevog’s work from 2011, Woven Person (Woman with Two Vices) (figure 1a), I was mesmerized, and had a sense I was affected by something within the same vein as that of, Leonor Fini. She is created by the inspiration of watching sex-workers outside her studio windows on Hastings Street.

 The black woven life-size person stands as though a shadow revealing some but not all of what may keep a person chained to reality. The two vices keeping the figure in place represented to me the vices that we carry with us through life, that keep us rooted in the physical. After a quick little search on line, I found that Fluevog is a highly spiritual and Christian woman. The resonance of spirituality that exists in this piece is reminiscent of the first wave of feminist artists who attempted to portray the world seen through a woman’s eyes. Fluevog continues this tradition by questioning what is our reality, our physicality, our spirituality and how do they inter-weave themselves through our individual lives?

While still completing her studies at NSCAD, Fluevog began on weaving her life-size loom and completed it after returning home to Vancouver. In the sculpture you can see the dualities of which I spoke of above. The history of the loom is vast and was a great force in the divide between women’s work and that of male influenced industry. When it was invented it led the way to many new textile options and quicker fabrication of clothing.[6] It also challenged the domestic roles women and men held within society. By creating a loom out of the fabric it makes, and her life-size nudes she returns to question what can be considered a woman’s work, or even greater what can be considered an artist’s practice?

Britta Fluevog is very interesting artist and I am excited of what will come from her within the next few years.

Bibliography:

Fluevog, Britta, Email to Author, September 24 2012,

                Moving Away From The Tar Sands, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVcmDcB59s

Freedgood, Elaine, “Fine Fingers: Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption,” Victorian Studies Vol. 45, No. 4 (Summer, 2003), pp. 625-647 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3829530  accessed October 9 2012

Pentney, Beth Ann, Feminism, Activism, and Knitting: Are the Fibre Arts a Viable Mode for Feminist Political Action? http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/view/pentney/210 Accessed October 13, 2012