Craft Year 2015

Online Screening - available for viewing from Friday, September 25 at 5pm to Sunday, September 27, 2015

Thanks for watching everyone!

In celebration of Craft Year 2015, the Manitoba Craft Council is pleased to partner with Video Pool Media Arts Centre to bring you this program of shorts by three Manitoba artists whose work intersects with craft: tamara rae biebrich, Chantel Mierau and Seth Woodyard.

While documentaries and how-to videos are ubiquitous online (and we love them!), the works presented here emerge from a place deep within the artists’ practice and speak to craft in subtler ways.  With humour and sensitivity, they reflect on the role of repetition and process, material and necessity – concepts inextricably intertwined with thinking about craft.  The sensual and subversive nature of craft is surfaced through a lowered visual field that draws our eyes downward to the hands.  The identity of the makers is blurred; the focus is on the larger community and a common human experience.  Time-based media have a unique power to make visible the invisible;  in this case, the labour and sheer time itself that making entails is revealed.

Thank you to Jennifer Smith for the hidden work involved in bringing these videos to a wider audience and to the artists for sharing their vision.

-Tammy Sutherland, Manitoba Craft Council Programme Coordinator

The videos were available for viewing from Friday, September 25 at 5pm to Sunday, September 27.

Craft Year 2015

Her Hands Are Dangerous by tamara rae biebrich

2007 | 3:10

Through a candy-coated lens, Her Hands Are Dangerous.. challenges consumerism with the gesture of creative and domestic labour.

This 3-minute experimental video evokes the aesthetic of super 8 film projections, with a soundtrack driven by the movement of hands and punctuated with simple drawings.

Craft Year 2015

The Clean House by Chantel Mierau

2011 | 7:21

In this two channel video, the image of cutting and sewing a pure white cloth underpins a narration about clean laundry, comfortable chairs, moths, dust and death, drawing parallels between repetition in the home, and tradition in the House of God.

Missed the online screening? See The Clean House on VUCAVU now!

Craft Year 2015

Working to Please by Seth Woodyard

2009 | 9:25

This video in one component in a larger installation called Man Made (2009) that includes architectural sculptures, video projections, and a performance piece. It documents part of the process of making one of the sculptural components of the installation. The artist is seen steaming and bending wood to make ribs for a dome. The piece emphasizes the repetitive and sensual aspects of the creative process, turning menial task into ritual.