the KnitKnit Sundown Salon
Fritz Haeg's geodesic dome has been host to many collaborative, choatic, utopian art events called the Sundown Salons . I was lucky to co-curate one of these happenings with Fritz and Sabrina Gschwandtner, of KnitKnit. We assembled garments, paintings, objects, performances, films, music, and spontaneous creations — all knitted, crocheted, and crafted.
It was a tremendous day. Texture, color, light and energy became tangible. One of my favorite elements was the screening - Sabrina brought films by Yayoi Kusama, Charles and Ray Eames, Stephen Beck, Michele Smith, and Michel Gondry.
The KnitKnit Sundown Salon was a featured work in an exhibit titled Common Threads that explored "knitting and embroidering as an artistic strategy for contemporary art." The show was curated by Lee Plested, and co-produced by the Illingworth Kerr Gallery and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.
Sabrina wrote a lovely piece about our salon that was published in the catalog for this exhibit.
I include excerpts from her essay here:
The KnitKnit Sundown Salon
by Sabrina Gschwandtner
Sara Grady’s expertise lies in gathering people together for elaborate picnics, film shoots, garden parties, and circuses. Fritz Haeg creates gardens, buildings, occasions, homes, and bridges. I don't know how Sara and Fritz first met, but I imagine it was an immediate and effortless commingling of vision and enthusiasm. Both are idealistic instigators of happenings.
Together they hatched a plan for a salon about knitting, and then Sara called me. Because Sara and Fritz were in Los Angeles and I was in Brooklyn, the three of us planned most of the KnitKnit Sundown Salon through e-mail: the idea was that I would bring artwork to Los Angeles with me, and they would invite local artists, crafters, and designers to create and show work inside Fritz's geodesic dome in Eagle Rock, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
...
KnitKnit is a biannual ‘zine as well as a name under which I am able to curate art shows and events. It is also a vehicle for expressing my interest in the extreme, the unconventional, the direct, the weird, the funny, the shocking, the anti-craft, and the anti-art. I am always seeking people who have pushed their ideas about craft to the limit. These extreme knitters—and their votaries—are those whom Sara, Fritz, and I invited to the KnitKnit Sundown Salon.
...
When event attendees packed up the craft projects they had been invited to work on throughout the day, they left behind bits of fabric, yarn, and thread -- a dotted map that we followed up the stairs and out the front door when it was time to go home.
It wasn't just the quality of the work inside the dome or the abundant activities that made the event momentous; it was the complete reciprocity with which the work was given and received. I have not experienced that level of engagement at any other art show. For eight hours on a gray February day in Los Angeles, the KnitKnit Sundown Salon existed as a utopic, three-tiered marvel of handmade wonders, a communal undertaking that gave me hope for the rise of a new social order.
