the Brookyln Love Project

This Wednesday night I walked a short walk from my house to attend the opening of Iviva Olenick's Brooklyn Love Project at Muriel Guepin Gallery. If you follow embroidery on the web you kind of would have to be blind to not know Iviva's work.


Her well known blog Were I so besotted follows her work, her daily jogs, and her dating life all in stitch.


I have had the pleasure of knowing Iviva for a number of years now but this was really the first time I saw her work in such mass and installed in a space. It was so nice. Her work definitely feeds off each other and I prefer seeing them as a group rather then individually.


Each work stands on its own as a piece but when the works hang together they tell such a bigger story about life and Iviva. Which makes sense since it seems like she does indeed make her work as series.


The opening was a huge success she had a great crowd and a number of red stickers. Go stitchers.


Her project was all about collecting the unique love stories of Brooklyn. The individual pieces are individual love stories. She also made a map of Brooklyn and included one story for each neighborhood. Me an Chad are her cobble hill story...but I "dragged" my husband up onto the roof not "drug" him- where is my proper English.


She also exhibited some of her collaborative works with Jon Baker, Fiber Graf, which combines his tags with her amazing and beautiful french knots.


You can read more about the project and see the works over at her blog here or her art archive here. And you have until the end of next week to see it.

narrative embroidery...

I love the narrative embroideries of fellow Brooklyn embroiderer Iviva Olenick. She uses thread to write sweet and sad stories and comments dealing with the lonely complications of contemporary love.


Often playing with issues of Internet dating and the bizarre and complicated navigation this arena takes.
Sometimes her work breaks your heart...

or reminds you of moments in your own life...

or makes you chuckle with its humor and sweet honesty. Iviva states:

In a culture increasingly reliant on the internet, email, and text messaging to communicate, connect, and reconnect, I have chosen embroidery, an old-fashioned and time-consuming medium, as my primary communication vehicle. I create vignettes smaller than one foot in scale incorporating text and illustrations. My collection of hand-stitched pieces is an unbound book or blog where I observe, remember, fantasize, daydream, and invent.

I particularly really love her series Family album, there seems to strangely be something more honest in these works. Though the language and images are not as seemingly obvious as her other series there does seem to be a more sincere vulnerability in the portraits of her loved ones.

This piece is especially sweet, with the embroidering of her grandmothers handwriting.
Check out her blog here.

So much inspiration abound, it is exhausting.