Lia Cook is an artist and professor of art at the California College of Arts in Oakland, since 1976. As an undergraduate and graduate student she worked closely with Ed Rossbach at the University of California, Berkeley.
Cook is fascinated with the potential of weave structure. She acquired an antique Jacquard loom head in Europe in the early 1980s and restored it to working condition. She researched the traditional Jacquard design process then pioneered the use of the electronic Jacquard handloom both in her studio work and in the classroom. Currently, she produces her weavings on a loom with 2,640 independently programmable warp threads. She uses photographic and weave software to design her work.
Cook has received numerous awards, including being named a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 1997 and a Gold Medal Award at the From Lausanne to Beijing: the 5th International Fiber Art Biennale exhibition in Beijing, China, in 2008, as well as the Excellence Award at the 1989 International Textile Competition in Kyoto, Japan. She actively exhibits her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.
Cook is part of the exhibition Person Place Thing (April 9 – September 6, 2010) at the Textile Museum of Canada..
This installment of Innovators + Ideas (I2) is a partnership with the Textile Museum of Canada.
The Textile Museum of Canada
The Textile Museum of Canada (TMC) is one of Toronto's most engaging visual arts organizations. With over 12,000 objects from more than 200 countries and regions, the TMC's permanent collection celebrates cultural diversity and includes traditional fabrics, garments, carpets and related artifacts such as beadwork and basketry. The museum offers a broad variety of exhibitions including themed shows based on our permanent collection and contemporary exhibitions of the work of Canadian and international artists. Open seven days a week, the TMC is in the heart of downtown Toronto steps from the St. Patrick subway station.
textilemuseum.ca
Exhibition: Person Place Thing
The Textile Museum of Canada
55 Centre Avenue
(Dundas St. W & University Ave.)
April 9 - September 6, 2010
Faces & Mazes: Lia Cook
Curated by Wendy Weiss
This exhibition features Lia Cook's most recent series of weavings using an electronic Jacquard hand loom to weave faces that dissolve into continuously changing maze-like patterns. As the faces fragment, a perceptual shift occurs, moving through a place of transition and ambiguity to reveal the physical, tactile nature of the constructed image. Drawing on familiar and childhood sources, Cook uses a detail, often re-photographed, layered and re-woven in oversized scale, to intensify an emotional and/or sensual encounter. Faces & Mazes is organized by the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is accompanied by a 60-page illustrated catalogue. more...
Stumble: Stephen Schofield
Curated by Sarah Quinton
Montreal artist Stephen Schofield's one-and-a-half life-sized sculptures are intensely sensual. His patchwork figures, based on Pliny the Elder's tale of Dibutade recounting the origin of drawing, are mapped from the male body and then expertly tailored out of old clothes. Soaked in sugar water and then inflated, the cloth becomes a taut skin that contains the human forms that hover between a highly spirited/spiritual realm and a dream world filled with personal reverie. more...
David R. Harper
Curated by Sarah Quinton
David R. Harper (Halifax/Chicago) embroiders portraits of people on animal skins, playing on one of the traditional roles of portraiture which was to immortalize and elevate the subject through artistic representation – just as the trophy from a hunting excursion might be a bear skin rug or a rack of antlers. These images of anonymous, Victorian-era men and women imply an emotional distance that allows the artist to poke at the slippery slope where nature and culture meet. more...
Learn more about visiting The Textile Museum of Canada here.
LECTURE: Lia Cook – Faces, Mazes, and Neural Networks
Thursday, April 8, 2010 | 7pm
The Studio Theatre, York Quay Centre
235 Queens Quay West
FREE!
Cindy Lay, Lia Cook, 2009.
Woven cotton and rayon, 94 x 132 cm.
Face Maze: Dolly Girl, Lia Cook, 2009.
Woven cotton and rayon, 165 x 132 cm.
