Transpositions is the final in a three-part series of exhibitions that explore connections between textiles and technology. Building on the preceding exhibitions Interweavings and Remediations, the artists selected for Transpositions offer an expanded understanding of textile construction. Using non-traditional media such as wire, rubber, photographs, or insulation they transpose the technologies of weaving or braiding onto their chosen materials.

In genetics, ‘transposition’ refers to the transfer of a segment of DNA from one genomic site to another. In music, it refers to copying over a piece of music into a higher or lower key. The process of transferring sets of information inherently contains the potential for variations, glitches and the creation of new meanings. Works by artists Marisa Gallemit, Emily Hermant, Tong Zhou Lafrance, and Caroline Monnet activate this potential through processes of transformation and reconfiguration. Here, the knowledge of specific textile processes and aesthetics are brought into dialogue with materials that contain their own cultural and historical significance.

In Emily Hermant’s series Fragments From A Larger Whole, stripped copper telecommunications wires are meticulously aligned to create motifs that resemble woven textile swatches, complete with frayed thread ‘edges’ that reveal the nature of the source material. Patterns such as twill, checks, stripes and chevrons appear through careful arrangements of the repurposed wires, albeit with subtle irregularities and variations that recall glitches, embedded technological codes or the inherent variations of handmade production. Through this transformation, Hermant evokes the way that information is transmitted and adapted across time and distance, and how knowledge is circulated through technologies old and new.

Tong Zhou Lafrance cuts and reassembles old family photographs, weaving narrow strips into shimmering quasi-pixelated surfaces that emphasize how personal memories and shared cultural forms are distorted through time and representation. Lafrance alters these images as a means to examine their experience as an adoptee from China. By pulling apart memories in order to put them back together again, Lafrance’s works show how different perspectives might coexist within a single frame. More specifically, they are interested in how the story of adoption unfolds past the original event, with a life ‘constructed’ through the lens of before/after. By reworking family archives they exert their own sense of agency across significant memories and moments.

In Caroline Monnet’s ongoing series of woven works, the artist uses construction materials like Tyvek, insulation, and foam to address housing conditions in Indigenous communities. In these places, generic construction and lack of affordable supplies echo broader histories of systemic discrimination and neglect. Monnet uses these humble yet essential materials for their texture, colour and flexibility and adapts them by weaving traditional Anishinaabe patterns passed down through her family. Resembling maps or bar codes, these robust materials support an ongoing transmission of vital cultural information, just as they suggest protective coverings or forms of shelter and new ways of caring for each other.

Marisa Gallemit uses discarded bicycle tubes in her work, transforming this smooth, flexible material into sculptures and installations. For Tethering: Entanglement, Gallemit braided a 100-metre long bicycle tube rope during a durational performance in Dundas–St.Clarens parkette in Toronto. While researching the namesakes of the park, she was struck by the intersecting and contrasting legacies of Henry Dundas, an 18th c. Scottish politician who was instrumental in delaying the abolition of the slave trade and that of Saint Clarence, patron saint of prisoners. Through a slow and arduous process, Gallemit tethers present day material economies to overlooked histories of place.

Just as weaving and braiding can be considered forms of technology, in these artists’ hands, the unique properties of each material shape the way that the manipulation of various ‘threads’ take form. Materials always bring with them their own historical baggage, speaking to legacies of (mis)use, networks of circulation, and the transmission of geographically and culturally situated knowledge. Together, these works reflect and expand upon traditional categories of craft, skill, and making by transposing new meanings onto everyday materials and contexts.