I attended the International Art Fair in Toronto on its last day, October 26. This post shares a few of the artworks I saw there that used thread or the idea of thread.
Above,
Toni Hamel's drawing Flight of Fancy 2015. (16 x 20 inches)
The materials: graphite, watercolour on paper with thread.
Art Toronto brings together galleries from around the world.
These container sculptures (above) and the tank in the image below were made by
Jannick Deslauriers from organza, thread and beads.
The gallery that showed this delicate work: Art Mur from Montreal.
Art Mur also brought new work by Nadia Myre to its booth at the convention centre.
Nadia Myre won the 2014 Sobey Art Award. Her work is about healing and retaking control of the trauma caused by history. These black and white digital prints show the threads on the backs of panels she made in 2000-2003.
The titles of these large prints (43 x 33 inches each) are from left to right Orison #3, Orison # 4 and Orison #7 all 2014.
The Orison panels are the backs of three of the 56 pages Myre and more than 200 collaborators worked on between 2000 and 2003. Every letter in chapters 1-5 of the 1876 Indian Act of Canada was pierced by a needle and replaced with a bead.
Those black and white Orison prints show the 'hidden evidence of this act of subversion against a genocidal legacy of assimilation and colonialism, and also they are a poetic testament to the strength of connective threads that ultimately bind that resistance together." Bryne McLaughlin, managing editor Canadian Art Magazine.
One of the most luxurious uses of thread as an artist's medium is
Ed Pien's Play 2012.
The materials noted on the wall label state simply: 'rope',
Colour, texture, emotion and messiness are beautifully contained in this sculpture. Three of Pien's large ink drawings were mounted on the wall. (glimpsed above)
There is no thread in what appears to be an old fashioned one patch quilt by
Mitch Mitchell,.
It's digitally printed paper, folded and patched together with adhesive. dc3 art projects gallery.
My final selection of the many artworks that used thread or it's conceptual metaphor is this wall construction made from canvas that had been drawn on with ink, then cut up and sewn back together.
The artist is
Jessica Bell from Ottawa. The title of the piece is Folly, made in 2015. It was part of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition.
Art Toronto was at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre October 23 - 26 2015. It is an annual event, so plan to attend next year if you are in the area.
fantastical ceramics by Julie Moon from her exhibition Pretty Strange at Narwhal Art Projects 680 Queen St W Toronto
Plaster and printed fabric room decor by Celeste Toogood and Christopher Martin in the Gladstone Hotel (our room 301) 
No 5 / No 22, 1950 painting by Mark Rothko at the Art Gallery of Ontario 
and No. 16, (red, brown, black) 1958, another painting by Mark Rothko. Abstract Expressionism from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the AGO until September 4. In the explanatory videos the curator, Ann Temkin, advises: "These works ask for a type of concentration that is becoming increasingly unusual in a society that bombards our brains with simultaneous visual and auditory stimuli from countless directions. In a world that likes its culture fast, Abstract Expressionist works are uncompromisingly slow."
Rebecca Belmore, Thin Red Line 2009
Luanne Martineau, Parasite Buttress 2005, wool roving, needle felt, mattress foam.
Robert Rauschenberg 
Louise Bourgeois
Ann Hamilton
