Iris Häussler: Honest Threads
January 22 – March 8, 2009
At Honest Ed’s
581 Bloor Street W, Toronto

Toronto’s Honest Ed’s Bargain Warehouse. Image: mac.com

VoCA loved Iris Häussler’s exhibition The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach, in fact we wrote a feature story about it for Border Crossings magazine. See our post HERE.

A detail from The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach. Image: haeussler.ca

Häussler is part of an art movement that involves the public in art, in a way that blurs lines between reality and fiction. It can be quite disconcerting, but it certainly challenges us on many levels. Her latest exhibition, titled Honest Threads, requires participants. Häussler chose Toronto’s famous landmark, Honest Ed’s, to host an installation that engages the GTA public in sharing real life stories.

If you’ve ever wanted to walk in someone else’s shoes…now is your chance.

An area inside Honest Ed’s Store will be dedicated to an installation that imitates the set-up of a small clothing store collection, comprising clothes that have been lent by people all over the city.

The walls are filled with framed photographs of each owner wearing the specific article of clothing, annotated with the short story. Some of these stories go back a generation or two, depicting, for instance, a jacket worn by an immigrant on their journey across the ocean in the fifties.

What would it be like to wear her clothes? Image: picasaweb.google.com

The clothes are to be borrowed and worn for a pre-arranged period of time (e.g. one week) by visitors.

The project’s goal is to reveal the amazing richness of Toronto’s social and cultural fabric, making Honest Ed’s Store a point of intersection of all these individual stories – stories of immigration, of survival, of childhood dreams, or of the city’s cultural history, all told through the different articles of clothing.

For more information, please visit the Koffler Centre’s website HERE and Iris Häussler’s website HERE.