Last chance to see quilt exhibition

While each artist reinvents the fine craft of quilting in her own way, together they contribute to the renewed interest in textile art as a contemporary ground for investigation and artistic voice. The colours and textures of these two dimensional surfaces dramatically appeal to both visual and tactile senses.

The exhibition, which opened Jan. 17, closes this Saturday, Feb. 9.

Lam’s background as enterprising software professional serves the artist in her especially well. Applying honed analytic skills to a stash of fabrics collected over years, she creates quilts of extraordinary richness, both in exquisite detail and colorful, lyric design. The act of interweaving multiple layers of material is, for the artist, a process of exploring meaning, in particular the themes of family, cultural heritage and her personal journey of transformation. Change is a constant in her vocabulary.

She works intuitively, responding to serendipity and chance encounters of colour and texture. For Lam, quilting is the "perfect medium" for expressing her artistic voice: “Quilting provides me with unlimited puzzles into which I channel my energy to create structure, order and beauty,” she says.

A process of "pure riotous activiy"

Barbara Wisnoski’s textile work uses the visual vocabulary of quilting in offbeat ways. Her large-format hangings simultaneously subvert and pay homage to traditional quilt piecing techniques.

Using recycled fabric and clothing remnants, she first sews and then repeatedly slashes, resorts, resews and refractures fabrics in what she defines as a process of “pure riotous activity.”

Wisnoski’s work speaks to the relationship between texture and time. As she notes, “The process of building a piece, whereby a fabric loses its singular quality to become part of a whole, parallels how time washes a harmonious patina over objects and memories.” The end product thus appears as “part bas-relief, part quilt, part pixilated image”, a richly textured pictorial ground that suggests abstract landscapes or visually poetic colour fields.

The Gallery at Victoria Hall, 4626 Sherbrooke St. W., is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. Info: 514-989-5226.