MARY LOU RIORDON AND JOAN CAPLAN
  • Home
  • Projects
    • The Chant
    • Interloop/Wind as Weft
    • A Woman's Life
    • Current Connection on the Elbow River
    • Current Connection at the Deanne House
    • Art in the March
    • feminist spin
    • shafted flicker
    • Party Line
  • Essays
    • The Chant - Essay
    • Interloop/Wind as Weft - Essay
    • A Woman's Life - Essay
    • Current Connection at the Deanne House - Essay
    • Art in the March - Essay
    • feminist spin - Essay
    • Party Line - Essay
  • About
  • Contact

Art Installations
1990-1995
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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The Chant 

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Current Connection on
​the Elbow River

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feminist spin

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Interloop/Wind as Weft

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Current Connection at
the Deanne House

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shafted flicker

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A Woman's Life

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Art in the March
​

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Party Line

A language of resistance and co-optation
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"Several contemporary artists maintain the critical feminist agenda of the 1970s. They refuse to buy into the present neoconservative backlash against the social advances that were made by that previous generation of artists. As support for this project of refusal, these artists have access to a cornucopia of feminist and postmodernist practises and theories that have been accumulating since the 1970's, when women in the visual arts challenged the art world's modernist canon. The cornucopia is concerned with representation and signification.

By introducing analyses of the social practices of production and consumption into art, feminist and other postmodernist practises inflicted the coup de gråce to the Greenbergian tenets of truth to the material and the universality of art reception (like no iron polyester, these tenets guaranteed the self sufficiency of visual and aesthetic experience). Predictably, provocatively, the antipathy between feminism and modernism suggested a paradigmatic shift. Many of those who advocated the shift were linked by a common set of methodological positions: validation of collaborative attitudes over individualistic ones, careful attention to audience response, use of personal lives and daily activities as sites of political struggle, reappropriation of the body and the redefinition power. Many artists and cultural critics began to work together toward a creative revision of the status quo.
​At some moment during the challenge to modernism, several artists realized that textile practices are rich sites to explore and question the assumptions made about subjects like women's work, femininity and domesticity. The oppressive constraints of the textile tradition were recognized and new ways of negotiating meanings through textiles were sought."

                                                               Mireille Perron
                                                               Common Threads: Local Strategies for "Inappropriated " Artists
                                                               MATERIAL matters
                                                               The Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles
                                                               edited by Ingrid Bachmann and Ruth Scheuing
​                                                               copyright 1998 by YYZ Books
MARY LOU RIORDON AND JOAN CAPLAN
  • Home
  • Projects
    • The Chant
    • Interloop/Wind as Weft
    • A Woman's Life
    • Current Connection on the Elbow River
    • Current Connection at the Deanne House
    • Art in the March
    • feminist spin
    • shafted flicker
    • Party Line
  • Essays
    • The Chant - Essay
    • Interloop/Wind as Weft - Essay
    • A Woman's Life - Essay
    • Current Connection at the Deanne House - Essay
    • Art in the March - Essay
    • feminist spin - Essay
    • Party Line - Essay
  • About
  • Contact