Medium: Industrial felt, cedar

Dimensions: 8'4" x 6'2" x 6'2"

Photo credit: Eva Kolcze

Industrial felt sourced from: The Felt Store

Medium: Industrial felt

Dimensions: 5'10" x 2'6" x 2'6"

Photo credit: Eva Kolcze

Industrial felt sourced from: The Felt Store

Medium: Industrial felt

Dimensions: 6" x 6'6" x 6'6"

Photo credit: Eva Kolcze

Industrial felt sourced from: The Felt Store

Medium: Industrial felt

Dimensions: 2'8" x 6'4" x 6'4"

Photo credit: Eva Kolcze

Industrial felt sourced from: The Felt Store

Medium: Industrial felt, aluminum

Dimensions: 7'10" x 5'3" x 5'3"

Photo credit: Eva Kolcze

Industrial felt sourced from: The Felt Store

Medium: Industrial felt, rivets

Dimensions: 4' x 2'4" x 6"

Industrial felt sourced from: The Felt Store

Medium: Sisal, steel

Dimensions: 3" x 3" x 48"

Medium: Concrete

Dimensions: 8" x 8" x 8"

Medium: Latex, wood, cotton

Dimensions: 11” x 14” x 22”

Medium: Rubber, nails, steel

Dimensions: 12" x 10" x 20"

Medium: Cork, acrylic

Dimensions: 5" x 10" x 10"

Medium: Industrial felt, cork

Dimensions: 13" x 11" x 11"

Medium: Industrial felt

Dimensions: 12" x 4" x 12"

Medium: Roof felt, wood, acrylic felt, plexiglass mirror, LED lights

Dimensions: 9' x 4' x 4'

Medium: Cotton, mat board, foamcore

Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 6"

Medium: Sisal, steel

Dimensions: 12" x 8.5" x 21"

Medium: Steel, wood, paint

Dimensions: 1" x 6" x 20"

Medium: Mat board, foamcore

Dimensions: Vary between 5" x 5" x 5" to 12" x 12" x 12"

Medium: Paper, toner, thumbtacks

Dimensions: 12' x 8' x 6"

Canadians spend an average of 29 hours per week watching television.* In an eighty-year lifespan, this amounts to 13 years, 42 weeks and 01 day of television watching. A linear strip chronologically documenting each day of this time period is used to quantify this fact.

This single continuous strip is 35mm wide – a classic gauge for a reel of film. The images it displays are stills from television shows, capturing a cross section that spans countless genres and sixty years of television. Images are arranged randomly, such that, although arguably hugely diverse in content, a certain flattening out and equalizing occurs. This parallel’s one’s experience of television, a medium whose multifaceted content is delivered to the viewer identically.

Much like a reel of film that has been emptied and strewn across the floor, this single linear strip winds around and through itself. Although one’s experience of watching television, and conception of time, is ostensibly linear, memories of both interweave, overlap, block each other out, and come to the forefront.

* Figure from the Television Bureau of Canada for the 2010/2011 broadcast year.

Medium: Canadian pennies

Dimensions: 12" x 12"

Fiat (noun): A formal authorization or proposition; a decree; an arbitrary order.

Fiat Money (noun): Money made legal tender by a government decree or fiat. Not pegged to a standard such as gold or silver. Face value is not proportional to commodity value or weight.

The artwork Fiat explores notions of deemed value and intrinsic value. Possible values given to this artwork are listed on price tags hanging from the piece itself:

Monetary Value
monetary value / penny: $0.01
# of pennies: 498
monetary value: $4.98

Production Cost
cost to produce 1 penny: approx. $0.018
# of pennies: 498
cost of production: approx. $8.96

Artistic Value*
artistic value: $125 / lb
weight / penny: 0.00518lb
# of pennies: 498
artistic value: $322.46

*note: Fiat was created for an exhibit entitled By The Pound, where work was literally sold in this way, for $125/lb.

Medium: One 1/4” x 84’ paper strip, toner

Dimensions: 7" x 7" x 7"

Few things are as timeless as the notion of time itself, and the accompanying quest for immortality. Conceptualized in innumerable ways, the tracking of the passage of one’s days pervades human history.

In this work, the contemporary daily cycle is quantified by a single linear strip which counts out 24 hours in one-minute intervals. This strip folds back into itself - 23:59 connecting back to 00:00 - forming a closed loop.

This loop, ostensibly a linear sequential strip, wraps and weaves into and out of itself. Similarly, in memory, arguably the locus of immortality, this sequence of time somehow collapses. Elements interweave, overlap, block each other out, and come to the forefront.

felt/felt

MFA Thesis Exhibition

Location: Gales Gallery, Accolade West (89 York Blvd.), York University

Exhibition Dates: April 24 - May 5, 2017

The sculptural investigations in this exhibition explore a relationship between sensorial bodily experience and psychological state. Large-scale industrial felt sculptures use space and form, with a particular interest in solitude, slowness, and sensory perception, to engender a gradual shift in consciousness through physiological engagement. The sculptures use processes such as wrapping, binding, and hanging, working with industrial felt’s disposition and navigating between asserting rigour and relinquishing control to develop form. The geometries that arise have a certain minimal formal austerity while embracing felt’s subtle yet irrepressible unruliness. There is a conversation between material, form, and experience in each of these works.

press release

Photo credit: Eva Kolcze

Industrial felt sourced from: The Felt Store

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

Curator: Megan Toye

Location: Gales Gallery, Accolade West (89 York Blvd.), York University

Exhibition Dates: May 2 - 13, 2016

Text by Megan Toye:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes asks: how do melancholic feelings take form? Is there a way to get to melancholia’s affect—the sense experience of pain, loss and grief—by attending to the material specificity of aesthetic form? And in what ways can visual forms and temporal structures act as metaphors for melancholic subjectivity?

Featuring an immersive industrial felt installation by Ellen Bleiwas, mixed-media sculptures by Erin Vincent, and a sound piece by Kriss Janik, After great pain, a formal feeling comes asks how material elements can communicate affectively. That is, the works here not only rely on the materiality of their form for their composition, but they actively embrace and showcase this materiality as central to the meaning and constitution of the work. Materiality is what contains the works’ affective texture; the material is the irreducible specificity of the form, the peculiar and particular ache, of the melancholic subject.

This is a Curatorial Intensive exhibition sponsored by the Art Gallery of York University in collaboration with York University’s Art History Department in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design.

press release

exhibition brochure

Photo credit: Eva Kolcze

Industrial felt sourced from: The Felt Store