A series of poetic tapestry collage works based on Levin’s insights into the histories of some of Elsewhere’s textile collection. The series incorporates both sales tags and the selvage edges of the fabrics to draw attention to these histories. It has been placed over Grant Heap’s Quilts from 2008 on the 2nd floor of the museum, as a way to extend a conversation between the two artists who both live and work in Toronto, Canada.
Melissa Levin (BFA Philadelphia College of Art 1982, MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 1998)
I am a wander – wonderer. In my daily travels I look for holes through which I can escape to find new worlds and magick.
I have been involved in a range of practices including printed textiles, instillation, single channel video, and architectural commissions. An integral aspect of my working process is to salvage the lost, the forgotten, the overlooked, the discarded, the once-precious things that time forgot. I collect archetypal artifacts that function as time capsules and embed them in my work.
Currently I have been working with vintage jigsaw puzzles. I mix up the puzzle pieces between two puzzles cut from the same mold. The final works present a topsy-turvy world where nothing sits in its expected place. The resulting landscapes threaten our collective memory of these archetypal spaces.
At Elsewhere I am mining the extensive textile collection to make Fabric Drawings.
My visual work has shown in the solo and group shows in the Canada and the US, and my video works have screened in film festivals around the world as well as on national Canadian television.
"I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn to do it".
—Vincent Van Gogh
