Virtual Book Club with Karen Kraven & Kim McCollum
Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women
Ongoing Slack Discussion Board
Wednesday Zoom Meetings
April 22, April 29 & May 6 at 5pm MST / 7pm EST
We are excited to host a virtual Book Club with Karen Kraven and local artist Kim McCollum, on Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women, which was influential in Kraven's current exhibition Lull at Latitude 53. The book club will take place through a Slack discussion board and three Zoom meetings on three Wednesday evenings: April 22, April 29 and May 6, 5pm MST / 7pm EST.
Copies of Garments Against Women are available for purchase in the newly updated bookshop on our website, courtesy of our friends at Glass Bookshop. In Montreal, reach out to Drawn & Quarterly to make local arrangements for delivery or pickup.
Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms —like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women's and children's lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain.
Karen Kraven is a Montreal-based artist working with photography, sculpture and installation. Influenced by her father's (and his father's) knitting factory that stopped manufacturing the year she was born and by the physical and optical properties of textiles, her practice explores the ways clothing registers the body–how the body is unfinished, unstable and under interrogation–pointing to the sustained impact of work, wounds and wear.
Recent solo exhibitions include Dust Against Dust, Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2019), Pins & Needles at the Toronto Sculpture Garden (2018), Deadstock, Maw Gallery, NYC (2017), Flip Flop Punch Front, Mercer Union, Toronto (2015) and Razzle Dazzle Sis Boom Bah presented at the ICA, Portland, Maine and the Darling Foundry, Montreal (2014/5). Her work has also been included in exhibitions in Toronto, Marseille, Mumbai and Baltimore. Reviews have been published in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Momus and Artforum. Karen Kraven is represented by Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal.
Kim McCollum’s work explores relationships between digital and analog, old and new, hand and machine. Using the structure of the grid, she investigates visual relationships between weaving patterns and digital space. McCollum holds an MFA and MSc from the University of Alberta and is a creator of networks within local craft and arts communities in Edmonton, connecting people and ideas through her work as an artist, organizing events, and working as an educator. She also co-owns Gather Textiles, a workshop space and community building initiative.