MATR 2023 || Lee Jones & Greta Grip
Media Art + Technology Residency 2023 Recipients
Please Welcome Greta Grip and Lee Jones to VP's Media Art + Technology Residency Program!
It is our pleasure to announce Greta Grip and Lee Jones as the 2023 recipients of the Media Art + Technology Residency (MATR). MATR is designed to be a site-specific exploration of VP’s intimate Poolside Gallery where artists will respond to and utilize the gallery’s characteristics.
The theme for MATR this year is (de)PRESS(i)ON, and is a part of a year-long program celebrating and exploring VP’s 40th anniversary, what we are referring to as our Mid-life Crisis™. This program represents STAGE 4: Depression, or, as we like to think, PRESS ON.
THE RESIDENCY
In response to our call, (de)PRESS(i)ON, these two artists have proposed an evolving/devolving, interactive, data-collecting, technology and craft related artwork that will respond not only to VP's gallery, but will involve ways of including other areas of the building while drawing together ideas and inspiration from both historical and current activities. We look forward to the collection of data and the research that will inform the development of this work, and the treasure of lasting information to be gleaned about VP from this work.
The artwork will be evolving over the next couple of months, and you can expect to see technology-controlled crafting bits around Artspace in the near future.
For more info about the artists, visit: everydaytextiles.com
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Greta Grip
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
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, and tangible artworks. We are interested in community participation and
making tinkering with technology accessible to broader audiences.
More on their website: everydayetextiles.com
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
In consultation with the VP team, we will explore the archive with the aim of capturing important moments in the history of VP. For example, this could be around themes of technological development over the years and how artists explored the edges of each new technology, important moments in the evolution of the organization, or around the history of media and interactive arts in Winnipeg, or other themes the VP team would like to highlight for this historic anniversary.
The resulting elements captured through online workshops and discussions with the team will then be turned into interactive machine knit panels as part of our ongoing participatory explorations of “Unraveling: It’s Up to You”. Through this series of site-specific works, Greta Grip and Lee Jones have explored gathering community reflections, visualizing them as knitted panels, and then unraveling them with physical computing systems that wind up the yarn and unravel it until it disappears. The goal of our “Unraveling” series is to use making and unmaking as a way to reflect on collective feelings around a period of time, to break them down and take them apart in order to better understand them.
For example, in our previous iteration of “Unraveling: It’s Up to You” we worked with Union Gallery at Queen’s University to gather community reflections from individuals in Kingston on what they learned from the pandemic. These panels were then unraveled during a summer weekend at a local park. As individuals approached the installation, their presence was sensed through ultrasonic sensors that then spun a motor to wind up the knitted panels until they fully disappeared.
This artwork series makes use of the physical affordances of machine knitting. Knitting is a process that uses a single yarn that is manipulated into looping knots to create a textile. Due to this fabrication method, machine knitted panels can also be unraveled by pulling the end of a piece and turned back into a spool of yarn. Machine knitting specifically is influenced by the history of computing. With her hacked knitting machine Greta makes image graphics in binary colours, with two stitches: a knit and a purl stitch that can be translated into binary 1s and 0s, are then automatically stitched as a pattern on her machine. By unraveling these graphical knitted panels, new layers are revealed underneath to create a slow textile video.
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Stay tuned for more details as the project 'unravels'.......