Info on individual and guest ticket sales for speakers can be found HERE.
Friday, June 26, 2015, 6:00 pm
Keynote Speaker, Joanna Berzowska
Our keynote speaker for Friday night will be Joanna Berzowska. She is Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University and a member of the Hexagram Research Institute in Montreal. She is the founder and research director of XS Labs, where her team develops innovative methods and applications in electronic textiles and responsive garments. Her art and design work has been shown in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in NYC, the V&A in London, the Millenium Museum in Beijing, various SIGGRAPH Art Galleries, ISEA, the Art Directors Club in NYC, the Australian Museum in Sydney, NTT ICC in Tokyo, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz among others. She lectures internationally about the field of electronic textiles and related social, cultural, aesthetic, and political issues. She was selected for the Maclean’s 2006 Honour Roll as one of “thirty nine Canadians who make the world a better place to live in”. She received her Masters of Science from MIT and worked with the Tangible Media Group of the MIT Media Lab before co-founding International Fashion Machines in Boston.
“XS Labs is a design research studio with a focus on innovation in the fields of electronic textiles and reactive garments: “second skins” that can enable computationally-mediated interactions with the environment and the individual. We are equally inspired by the technical and cultural history of how textiles have been made for generations (weaving, stitching, embroidery, knitting, beading, quilting) and by new and emerging materials with different electro-mechanical properties. This enables us to construct complex textile-based surfaces, substrates, and structures with “transitive” properties.”
Sunday, June 28, 2015, 11:45 am
Jana Vander Lee is a tapestry weaver whose work is in the collection of the City of Houston and included in the Fiberarts Design Book series. She has curated fiber exhibits for Blaffer Gallery University of Houston, Art Institute of Houston and Diverseworks. Jana also curated an exhibit at Transco Tower that toured to Textile Arts Centre in Chicago. Her articles have appeared in FiberArts Magazine, Handwoven, Surface Design Journal and the CHT newsletter. She has presented workshops and lectures for the Canadian Arts & Crafts Council; Documenta VII Germany; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; University of Texas, Austin; American Craft Council and CHH.
She will address: Luminary Weavers/Visual Art Peers. Emerging from the textile traditions, Anni Albers, Lenore Tawny and Claire Zeisler found the loom a springboard for their creative ideas that launched new art forms and redefined the textile field. The progression of their work parallels contemporaries in paint and sculpture whose work may look similar but is based upon different concepts. Celebrating the unique aesthetics of these legendary weavers offers inspiration and a deeper understanding of what it is to weave and all the art forms arising from the basic elements of that process.
