Lee Jones & Greta Grip, Lacey Decker Hawthorne and Riss Sean Cruz
Thursday, October 26, 8:30 pm
Struts Gallery, 7 Lorne St.
Down to the Wire is part of No Ceiling: It's About Time
Down to the Wire is a group show at Struts Gallery featuring three distinct installations selected from our open call. Each work engages with the theme of time in a unique way, exploring and embodying archives, real-time data, labour, and memory through tactile and digital means. The Life of a Party by Lee Jones & Greta Grip is a knitting machine that responds to the physical activity within the gallery, creating a record of the event that is imperfect, tangible, soft, and colourful. Marking time through the material of domestic fibrework, Counting Stitches is a video installation by Lacey Decker Hawthorne that tracks the labour involved in a simple embroidered handkerchief. Riss Sean Cruz sets the scene to experience XP, an episodic video work that uses costumed performance and computer-generated imagery to appropriate defining symbols and methodologies embedded into consumer-available technology of the 2000s information age. Each work is an attempt to chronicle a passing of time and perhaps manifest the inherent fallibility of doing so.
About the artists
Lacey Decker Hawthorne is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, textiles, writing, and research. Her current practice explores invisible, embodied labour in the materials and architecture of domestic spaces, and caregiving as a site of praxis. Her work has been shown in Canada, the UK, Japan and France, and supported with funding from ArtsNB and the Canada Council for the Arts. She currently lives and works in Sackville, New Brunswick, on the unceded ancestral lands of the Mi’kmaq peoples.
Riss Sean Cruz is a digital multimedia and video performance artist from Kjipuktuk (so-called Halifax). Cruz’s topics of interest are related to labour, power and surveillance as seen through digital platforms and pop culture. Their experimental videos comprise found footage, 3D modelling, sound design and costumed performances to look at value systems with critical sensibility. These satirical works aim to capture a fast-paced contemporary present and envision possible, liberatory futures.
Greta Grip enjoys pulling the strings of what is traditional knitting and winding it around the digital age. Greta started to exhibit her knitted food in 2009, since then her practice has evolved from knitting QR codes to EL wire. Currently, Grip knits with her hacked knitting machine. Hacked it by removing its original brain and replacing it with an USB port. Focused on a practice of exploring the use of layering texts and symbols, colours and textures; foregoing the unfinished and flawed, Grip’s work challenges the understanding of what knitting is supposed to look like. Her signature labels: A treasure to remember by Greta Grip is the finale as she once again pokes fun at the seriousness of what is art. More on her page: GretaGrip.com
Lee Jones is a postdoctoral fellow with the iStudio Lab at Queen’s University. Before joining the lab, she did her PhD at the Creative Interactions Lab at Carleton University, where her thesis focused on e-textiles, hybrid craft, and textile personal fabrication. In her research she develops DIY toolkits so individuals can design and create interactive soft technologies to suit their own needs. She also loves running community e-textile workshops at art galleries and makerspaces, and creating interactive participatory artworks. More on her page: LeeJones.ca
Greta and Lee have been an artistic duo since 2019. We have collaborated in several public art installations, exhibitions, residencies, peer-reviewed publications, and have received grants for our interactive, participatory, tangible art. Our interest in public art is with works that are controlled by and respond to the audience. We also continue our interest in how we can activate art spaces during the pandemic. Data is of particular interest to our practice because of all the invisible data sources and sensors that capture us throughout the day without us noticing. But visualized data can also encourage us to reflect on how we perceive and react to the data. In our practice we aim to make this data visible and tangible. We are interested in community participation, and making tinkering with technology accessible to broader audiences. More on our page: Everydayetextiles.com
Image credit: Still from Counting Stitches, Lacey Decker Hawthorne, 4K video, 2023, 17:08