in the asil gallery
May/June 2025
My Detroit
An exploration: textile interpretations of iconic Windsor/Detroit architecture and landscapes
Closing Reception. Thursday, June 5th, 5pm until 7pm
Lisa Sylvestre. My Detroit: An exploration through textiles.
Windsor/Detroit: beautiful, exploitive, highly industrialised, complex. The stark realities of oppression and massive environmental degradation are obvious but beauty, richness, humanity, and the vibrancy of the region run deep.
In several pieces, My Detroit re-imagines the grit, the decaying structures, disruptive roadways, and natural landscapes through texture and colour, through light and shadow. Some of the most elaborate examples of architecture in the world are reconceived through cloth and stitch, through natural dyes and texture.
The duster coats explore the rampant wealth that began to characterize the Windsor/Detroit region over a century ago. Unbridled prosperity, derived from human and environmental exploitation, was celebrated through the construction of elaborate and costly architecture.
The Guardian and Book Tower pieces imagine that there are lighter ways to tread. Soft cotton, linen and wool which have been dyed by hand from natural and in some cases locally sourced plant material cannot, of course, provide the raw materials for towering buildings, but they can and do provide warmth and protection, and beauty.
*The two coats which are a part of My Detroit were made using the Lichen Duster pattern, developed, and produced by Sew Liberated, a small and independent pattern design company.
Jodi Green, Looking Across, Looking Inward #s 1 and 2. 2009
The print series Looking Across, Looking Inward is a quiet exploration of the feeling of disjointedness of living in a border city whose landscape and culture is dominated by a larger city separated from us by politics and geography. Fireworks scatter over a shared river; light from buildings in the United States penetrates window blinds to enter bedrooms in Canada. Below, a map of residential streets on the near side, above, a gritty tracery of buildings on the far side, and between them, the landscape that connects and divides us: soil, roots, water.
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