November 16 – 30, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, November 16, 6 – 10 p.m.
GALLERY 918
918 Bathurst Street, (just north of Bloor)
Toronto, ON
T: 416.538.0868
www.918bathurst.com
Hours: Tues-Wed 1-5, Thurs-Fri 1-8, Sat-Sun 11-5 p.m.
A public art memorial celebrating life and death through clothing and story.
“…My last memories of her are of birds singing quietly out the window, the smell of gardenia, and blue.”
In 2007, over 100 people across Canada contributed to Collecting Loss by donating clothing that belonged to their deceased loved ones and the stories this clothing evoked. The clothing and stories have been given new life in a powerful public art memorial by textile artist Esther Kalaba and writer Karen Haffey. A national touring exhibit, Collecting Loss: Weaving Threads of Memory will be on display at Toronto’s Gallery 918 from November 16 to 30.
This extraordinary multimedia installation, incorporating textiles, photography, audio recordings and print, acts as a public memorial. Paying homage to the deceased through the act of remembering, Collecting Loss creates a visual and verbal gathering place for grief, allowing for public expression of mourning and dialogue about death.
This project is the first of its kind to use textile art with story-telling to address society’s relationship to death and how it is that we grieve. By using clothing from people who have died, this project takes what are, for the most part, hidden and intimate memories about a person’s life and makes them public. Collecting Loss thereby challenges the notion that the discourse on death should remain private, acknowledging it as an unavoidable part of life.
The final textile works are re-created items of clothing, made from pieces of the donated clothing which belonged to those who have died. The metaphor of change and transformation is made tangible through the textile pieces in the gallery. What was once an individual piece of clothing becomes collective fabric, carrying within it new life and stories of its own. The result is a beautiful, intricate, and textural patchwork that unites all the clothing contributed to the project and shows that we are never alone in our experience of grief. The accompanying book poignantly captures Collecting Loss in print.
The idea for the exhibit was shaped from Esther Kalaba and Karen Haffey’s personal grief journeys. Both artists met while training to facilitate bereavement groups with Bereaved Families of Ontario – Toronto. Common experience brought them together. As teenagers, Esther and Karen each lost siblings – Esther’s brother to murder and Karen’s sister and brother to a fatal blood disorder. These deaths have profoundly impacted the life and work of these two artists, and are what gave rise to this project.
Through the integration of multiple artistic disciplines, Collecting Loss places the deceased in front of a living lens. By doing so, the project creates a new social fabric where personal loss is a strong and supportive common thread that ultimately serves to weave communities, while offering many creative possibilities about what it means to grieve and how we can celebrate death and life together.