Please join fashion designer Sage Paul and artist Meera Sethi for an online conversation about their artistic practices that consider Indigenous and ancestral knowledge, healing, and relationships of care and justice in the fashion industry. This is an ancillary program to the Fashion Forward and ¡Adelante Siempre! art exhibition at WAHC curated by Hitoko Okada, who will moderate the talk.
This event is being co-hosted with X University’s Fashion Program at the Creative School.
Pre-registration is required for this free online program. Please register by clicking HERE.
ABOUT THE CURATOR AND PANELISTS:
Hitoko Okada (Curator) is a fibre artist, curator, community arts organizer and facilitator. She completed the fashion design program at the International Academy of Design in 2005, in Toronto. She worked as a textile designer and garment worker in Toronto’s fashion industry; and as a costumer for theatre across the country including The Vancouver Opera, The Grand Theatre in London, The Stratford Shakespeare Festival and Mirvish Productions in Toronto. In 2009, she launched her own label, Hitokoo, producing mini collections. She is currently exploring an alternative approach to design and production, informed by her social practice and informal studies of social permaculture, cultural heritage craft and research from her current exhibition Fashion Forward and ¡Adelante Siempre! Her curatorial practice has developed over ten years working with local, national and international artists for exhibitions and public programs in Hamilton and Burlington, Ontario. As a fibre artist, Okada has been exhibiting work for over twenty years in Vancouver, Hamilton, and Toronto. Her practice has evolved through artist residencies and workshops at Haystack School of Craft in Maine, USA and Kawashima School of Textiles in Kyoto, Japan. Her current body of work explores the history and ancestral knowledge of cultural heritage crafts of Japanese indigo, kakishibu dye, and shifu weaving, supported by the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council of the Arts. She is a recipient of the Hamilton City Arts Award for Established Artist in Craft; a core member of the Hamilton Seven Storytelling Collective, and a member of the Burlington Handweavers and Spinners Guild.
Sage Paul (Panelist) is an urban Denesuliné tskwe based in Toronto and a member of English River First Nation. Sage is an award-winning artist & designer and a recognized leader of Indigenous fashion, craft and textiles. Her work centres family, sovereignty and resistance for balance. Sage is also founding collective member and Artistic Director of Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto, external link. Some of Sage’s art and design has shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s First Thursday among other venues. Sage sits on the Ryerson School of Fashion Advisory Board and is developing an Indigenous Fashion elective course for George Brown College.
Meera Sethi (Panelist) is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose affective, research-based practice explores the body, dress, garments, and materiality from critical, feminist, and anti-colonial perspectives. She uses drawing, painting, fibre, illustration, and performance to think through migration and its relationship to fashion, care, embodiment, and self. Meera’s work is in the permanent collection of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Wedge Collection and has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Mississauga, and the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival among other venues.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS
