Past Exhibition
Selected Works
Kathryn Ruppert-Dazai
June 2004
A look at several series of work that Kathryn Ruppert-Dazai has engaged with over the last several years. From the "Delhi Series" that refer to her formative years in the tobacco belt of Southern Ontario to the "Berlin Series" that explores the German ancestral roots of her family, both of which are source material for developing a personal mythology around these reflections and speculations.
The sole medium for these visual explorations is knitting, that textile technique usually relegated to sweaters and socks, but here in the hands of Ruppert-Dazai, her clunky off-hand technique which also utilizes a child's knitting machine explores a dimension peopled with animals, blobs and characters to define a narrative for her own story-book world.
Substituting animals in place of people reinforces this children's story book narrative and as with traditional fairy tales there is invariably an atmosphere of threat or menace which is reinforced by her loosely, expressionistic handling of the yarn.
A juxtaposition of odd sensibilities and posed naivete reflect our adult world from some other vantage, an amusing and somewhat unsettling viewpoint.