at the Shevchenko Museum
Toronto, Ontario
November 7-28
1604 Bloor St. W.
I will be hosting a show at the Shevchenko Museum (1604 Bloor St. West in Toronto) from the 7th to the 28th of November 2025.
There will be six large scale acrylic paintings (averaging in size 4′ x 7′) that are exact replicas of Ukrainian embroidery patterns such as the one featured above.
There will be animations for each of the designs that play back the process of creating the designs (square-by-square) set to music drawn from the Ukrainian Art Song Project archives. There will also be a seventh painting that will be an amalgamation of the the six designs. Also, small scale ink on watercolour paper paintings of white-on-white embroidery designs. There will be some discussion on what was discovered during the process of reproducing these designs and some numerical analysis as well.
All of the paintings are listed below. Clicking on their titles or images will take you to the page dedicated to that design.
more details
The animations were created using a simple program written in Processing that records and then plays back the drawing process one square (pixel) at a time. Accompanying the animations are audio works based on material from the Ukrainian Art Song Project. This beautiful organization, based in Toronto, Ontario, has curated a collection of ‘art songs’ – mini opera pieces from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, composed and performed by Ukrainian artists. They offer an online archive of these works which include downloadable scores of each of the songs which are free for public use. The scores were translated into MIDI files (using Sebilius software) which were then used in audio multi-track software to recreate the pieces.
I aim to develop systems relating the music to the designs, their encoded meanings, and the creative process used in developing them – the ancient codes. I definitely felt the affect of methodically drawing out these repetitive designs – the rhythm has an effect.
I am interested in decoding some of the ancient meanings of these patterns using a number of processes which are designed to be a way of viewing different creative and psychological aspects of the designs.
There are prints available.
There are of course, the paintings themselves.
10% of all sales from this show will be sent to directly to Ukrainian organizations working to support the affected people.
Click on each of the images below to go to their respective web pages which includes information, commentary, animations, images, and audio.
design 1
design 2
design 3
design 4
design 5
design 6
7 – amalgamtion
8 – numerical analysis
