Femmebomberiffic

I have had the pleasure of working for the lovely Janet Morton over the past few weeks helping her with her installation for Nuit Blanche. This has involved lots of measuring, cutting, folding, stitching, zip-tying, pinning, and PINK. Our mission: to cover a public health building on Queen St W at Lisgar with a brand new, stunningly frou-frouey facade of various shades of everyones favorite colour. It includes 200 crocheted flowers (or 199 and a hat, which happens to look like a crocheted flower), snow fencing, and pink house-wrap (think Tyvek in drag). This resulted in many days in the park, with many curious passers-by (interestingly, the most menacing of which proved to be the after school crowd of 10 year olds, who seem to enjoy shouting). Highlights of the project for me included having my shoelaces repeatedly attacked by industrial velcro (don't be fooled, this stuff is STRONG, persistent, and has a mind of its own. Janet assures me that it is used--in tandem with other fasteners--to affix wings to aircraft); trying to sew strips of the aforementioned velcro onto panels of fabric (the spikes enjoy breaking the thread, which means constant re-threading of the needle, and requires lots of patience...and good music); and helping Janet sew 60 foot long seams. Yikes!

Luckily Janet stumbled on some willing participants to help with this ambitious project. One morning while I was myself in classes, Janet made a field trip to a nearby school and had bunches of high school art students weave 15 foot long strips of fabric through snow fencing, and do other equally time consuming tasks. (Photo thanks to Darren Calabrese of the Guelph Tibune.)

Yesterday, with the help of kindly riggers at the City of Toronto (one apparently goes by 'Snappy'), Femmebomb was installed. The official plan is that it will be lit up tonight for a kind of media showcase. I unfortunately wasn't able to attend, but I am looking forward to seeing it on Saturday!
I should say that the installation is a re-invention of the original Femmebomb, which Janet did as part of her spring 2004 residency at the University of Wisconson-Madison. There she covered the "Human Ecology Building," exploding and bringing out into the open the stereotype of it being an overwhelmingly female-dominated space, that wasn't often taken seriously, and was somewhat devalued (see photos below, from the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art website). Three cheers for pink!