the good

Who are you?  My name is Amanda McCavour. I studied drawing, printmaking and installation at York University. I started experimenting with thread when I was at school, using it as a drawing tool. After finishing up at York, I was accepted into the residency program at Harbourfront Centre in the textile studio. Now I work from my home studio in the Junction.  

What is on your ipod/bookshelf?  I have some very new additions to my bookshelf as of yesterday! I went to the Toronto Reference library for their book sale and got some books for 25 cents a piece. I got some great reference books on machine embroidery! I have lots of craft “how to” books on my bookshelf. I find that they are great for learning how to do things.  I also love the images of hands and different stitches and if you have a book like this from the ‘70’s (which i do!) there can be  some very nice fashion shots! I have lots of podcasts on my ipod. Podcasts are awesome. Music wise, Plants and Animals have been a new recent fave and Janelle Monae too!

Where do you seek inspiration? Books: I have a visual dictionary that was given to me by my grandparents, I think on my fourth birthday. It’s one of my go-to books. It’s full of diagrams and illustrations and exploded views of everyday objects.  

Antique stores/value village:  Items at these stores can just get me thinking about different things, I like how they are all in one place, sort of randomly placed but all given away for some reason or another.  

Google image searches: They’re a bit random and sometimes it’s really strange what can come up. I sometimes go on these horrible/amazing tangents from Google searches and find horrible/amazing things. That’s the beauty of the worldwide web.  

When did you start creating? I think I have always been drawing and making stuff.  I used to draw en mass when I was younger. Piles of paper and drawings would surround my desk downstairs. I also really loved googly eyes. Really, putting googly eyes on anything makes it amazing. That counts as creating, right?

Why Toronto? My family is close Toronto and since I have studied in Toronto and started working here, a lot of my friends are here too! Toronto is a great city to bike around in and I love going for runs along the west Toronto rail path. There is always lots to do. Toronto is never boring.

Inspirational graffiti in the city’s west-end.

Vanessa

The OCAD U Student Gallery’s first Mail Night was a great success! Caroline and I decorated for two days straight, and we baked enough cookies for an entire army of mail enthusiasts. Thankfully, we didn’t host an army — just an intimate party of dedicated correspondents. The gallery glowed with fairy lights and buzzed with the sound of typewriters. Our in house mail artist, Amanda Rataj, showed us inspiring samples from her (extensive) mail archive. Highlights from her presentation included a sewed, canvas envelope and a super-cute, tiny zine called “My Shirt is a Lady”. Hope to see you all at the next event!

Vanessa

I think it’s safe to say that our long and hard winter is finally, finally, coming to an end! It’s not just the longer days, the warmer sunshine and the disappearing snow that indicate spring’s imminence; it’s also the fact that my daily craving for a hot tea and cookie has been replaced by an insatiable thirst for a refreshing, zesty juice! Here it is — the very first of the season!

Caroline

Vanessa and I recently embarked on an ambitious project to collage the walls of a bathroom, from top to bottom (it looks fab by the way). It was essential that we had good tunes to make the hours upon hours spent in a small enclosed space, inhaling the podgy fumes go by a little faster. We listened to a few different mixes, but it was this one that stuck. We ended up playing it again and again and again; and so it soon became our “Collage Anthem” mix.

To be honest, I can’t take full credit for this superb playlist. My dear friend Lauren Basler (who lives in Washington D.C) sent it to me in the mail. While interning together this summer, we discovered we shared the same tastes in tunes, and so through out the year we send each other mix cds. This playlist is all Lauren! The bathroom collage is my vision for its cover.

In the spirit of collage, mail, and music; there are some events coming up at the OCADU Student Gallery (285 Dundas St West) that will celebrate all three! First up, MAIL ART NIGHT (March 23, 6pm)! Mail art master Amanda Rataj will be leading this evening of letter making. Stamps, stationary, tea & cookies will be provided! Next up, COLLAGE NIGHT (March 31 5pm)! The gallery will supply mounds of old magazines, scissors, glue, music and beer. All artwork will be displayed on the gallery walls for the following three weeks. It’s going to be collage madness! Lastly, there’s the MUSIC SWAP (April 14, 7pm), which will work like this: make a mix cd of your most played tunes; decorate the cover (heck, do that at the collage party); bring your mix to the party; play it, mingle and sip on a drink; and then leave with someone else’s mix cd. All playlists and covers will be published on the gallery’s website.

The “Collage Anthem” mix will definitely be played at all three events!

Caroline

I never did meet this year’s Sketchbook Project deadline; and my unfinished collage creation now lies unappreciated in the darkness of my bedside drawer. Before realizing that time was not on my side, I worked diligently and with vigour on page after page. The creative fury was energizing and calming all at once. Pursuing cut-and-paste prana, I realized how much I miss having a studio and yearned for those art school days when one had complete licence to spend the whole day making things. With spring (finally) around the corner, I’m resolving to shake off my mental malaise and recover my long-lost inner artist. To start, I’m going to gather my scattered work-books (including the said scrapped submission) and see if a zine or book project emerges from the chaos: a volume of considered, curated detritus.

Vanessa

Who are you? My name is Laurie Kang, I’m a visual artist. I work mostly in film photography and collage. See more here. My brain thinks sculpturally so I hope to see that manifest itself in more sculptural/installation work soon.

What is on your ipod / bookshelf? Half-finished/abandoned crosswords, Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Julio Cortazar’s Blow Up. Ipod/record player as of late: Destroyer, The Kinks, Wings, John Cale, John Lennon, Ike & Tina, James Blake, other great bands/artists that I can’t seem to think of right now. You can ask my husband.

Where do you find inspiration? It usually produces itself pretty organically based on who and what is around me and the experiences I have. Everything I look at and encounter throughout the day is seen as a possible source of inspiration. When I feel like I’m in a drought I’ll go browse magazines for an afternoon, or take a walk and hope to find abandoned books on the street.

When did you start creating? I’ve been “creating” for as long as I can remember. Art was always my favourite subject and doing crafts was my favourite activity: papier mache, colouring, glueing, etc. I’ve always been a visual communicator. As far as creating conceptual work goes, I started doing angsty stuff as a teenager…and then went to art school…and continued on in my practice…I really can’t see my life without it.

Why Toronto? I was born and raised in the GTA, so I’ve been here by default. Then I studied in Montreal for four years. Afterwards, I came back to live in the actual city of Toronto and loved it. It’s big but not overwhelmingly so, (fairly) accessible and bike friendly, has delicious ethnic foods, an active art and music community, the OAC and TAC. It’s unique in its cultural diversity and I appreciate that it’s commonplace to have five or more different ethnicities in a corner store or bar at any given time.

Who are you? Formally, I am a recent grad from OCAD, with a degree in photography. My practice includes photography, sculpture/installation, sound, cinema, and writing. See more here. Informally though, I am a mixed person who hails from Texas and New Mexico, and has an obsession with documenting memories, of the places, of the people, and of the moments or ideas that attribute to who I am.  

What is on your bookshelf / ipod? Well currently I’ve been obsessed with Excerpts by Ensemble, I’ve been reading Wind-Up Bird, and I’m getting  ready for my annually reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Some of my favorite bands are Radiohead, Wilco, Elbow, Miles Davis, Cinematic Orchestra, and Jim O’Rourke, and one of my favorite authors is Dave Eggers.

Where do you find inspiration? Usually life, and particularly my time in the desert, and that sort of supernatural culture.  As well as cinema, particular the films I grew up with, with the likes of early Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Kubrick.  There’s something about their work that is so embedded into both society, as well as my own memory, how as a child I melded into the worlds they created, and even after the movie was over, I was still in it, playing Jurassic Park with my sisters and neighbors.  Nowadays I don’t play Jurassic Park much, but I revisit those films to see these elements that are so vernactular and yet supernatural about them.  

When did you start creating? I started to draw and paint at a young age, both my folks are painters, and then I got into photography and film-making around when seventeen, and I stopped drawing.  I picked up carpentry in my third year at OCAD, and I’ve always been writing, I’m one of those types that tries to write a novel every few years and fails.  

Why Toronto? Sometime during my senior year in highschool I got burnt out from all the art competitions, my art teacher, and the whole scene; and so I enrolled in film at Ryerson, I took a bus from Houston to Toronto, and ended up staying here. That was seven years ago. I really dig it here. There’s some really great artists, and the community is very supportive, and I’m getting used to being in one place for a long stretch.  

On February 19, my worlds collided at El Mocambo on Spadina when three separate threads of friends came together to see Los Angeles electro-senation Baths perform live.    

Opening for Baths was Braids, a Montreal-based band of Calgary commrades. Their debut album, Native Speaker, was released only this past January; and already there are plans for a European tour. Braids played a well executed set of lyrical, Indie-pop ballads characterized by the impressive, swelling vocals of Raphaelle Standell-Preston and Katie Lee.

Baths’ performance was less than perfect; but his stumbling style and self-depreciating humour was endearing and fun. The crowd relaxed in turn and dance moves finally started to come out. It was obvious that the solo performer was more concerned with connecting with the audience than the ensemble act that preceded him, perhaps precisely because he was going it alone. Whatever the reason, his efforts invested me in the room’s energy and pulled me into the music; and now ‘Plea’ is set to repeat on my ipod.

Vanessa (with photo by Liz Gallin)