Wearable Art

jakalopes and wild things.

Wild Wear

Sea of Pink

Gosh it can be hard to take a decent photo of oneself. This is a pic of me in a pink dress I wore today, to be honest it was a little awkward. The weather report threatened snow and trying to get the tights to stay up, along with the knee socks, etc etc was trickier than just slipping into some jeans...Aaaanyways, today many of my colleagues and I wore pink as a stand against Bullying. Made me think once again about the symbolism of clothing as visual culture...Probably because I should be writing my artography paper right now instead of blogging, but oh well.

The reason behind all this pink is that back in September 2007 in Cambridge Ontario a boy wore a pink polo shirt to school on the first day and was harassed with homophobic taunting. A couple of grade 12 boys at the school decided to fight back against this kind of bullying. They went to a discount store and bought a bunch of cheap pink t-shirts and emailed their friends to tell them to wear pink as well. The next day it was a "sea of pink" at the school. I am excited about this little bit of home grown activism as well as the anti-homophobia/bullying message that these boys chose to send. A few weeks ago Steve Mulligan the Anti-homophobia and Diversity Consultant for the Social Responsibility and Diversity Team of the Vancouver School Board came to speak to us and he has sent me a couple of lesson plan ideas for pink day. Email me if you would like them. Here is a link to an article by the CBC about the boys in Cambridge.

The groovy teacher

I think this blog needs a little comic relief. Check out Kids in the Hall skit which a friend recommended to me. It exemplifies why teachers can't always be so groovy. It's a slippery slope people!

Love your body

I'm sure there are members of every generation who believe as I so often do that "things today" must be weirder than ever before...I get freaked out sometimes about body image issues in our culture, especially when I see young girls in heels and/or tummy tops discussing how "fat" Britney Spears is or WHATEVER. This type of thing of course pales in comparison to all the freakish reality TV shows they have on now about cosmetic surgery and the like. To be honest I don't watch these shows, but even hearing about them discourages and alarms me. I got an email though the other day and well, it kind of puts the present situation in perspective and makes me think that maybe we are just AS weird, but not more so. A number of years ago my Aunt and I went to Toronto to check out the new Yoko Ono exhibit, and among other delightful stops on that trip was our visit to the shoe museum. There we saw an exhibit about foot binding. This was a custom practiced on young girls and women for approximately one thousand years in China beginning in the 10th century and ending in the early 20th century. For more details check out the wikipedia site and this crazy slideshow comparing some of today's masochistic fashions, and those of the past. Seeing this makes me feel lucky to have grown up surrounded by confident women who knew and know how beautiful they are. One of these wise women once said "In ten years you will look at a picture of yourself and think, damn! I looked great! So save yourself the time and worries and love your body today" all I know is I want to move as far as possible away from fashions that restrict, deform and disempower. I am it seems instead adopting a uniform consisting mainly of loafers, cardigans, loose dresses and tights. I just wish it were warm enough to not have to think so much about clothes. As it stands now I feel like I have to plan 3 outfits every time I go out by the time I add all the necessary layers. I hope Tahiti is still looking for teachers by the time I graduate.

Here are a couple of pics of a little impromptu art/o/graphy project that Jaime, Kim and I did. Well, really, they did the work and I just stood there getting decorated. Pretty sweet deal for me. They hot glued all these pretty little fabric scraps onto me. I hope this "dress" it is still kicking around somewhere because I want it!

I have been playing around with the idea of what a teacher looks like. What one should look like, what the kids want to see, what I want to wear etc. I did a little getting to know me exercise with my grade 5 class the other day. I brought in a bunch of clothes each of which had a story of some kind attached to it. The kids got a chance to ask me questions about the clothes and then they got to decide on how I ought to wear the clothes. I was trying to play with the idea of clothing as a kind of visual culture, and as something which may give us clues about the wearer. They had fun and made me look pretty ridiculous. Apparently Devendra Banhart had a similar idea. If you want to dress him up click here.