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How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore1

Sarah Gotowka, Boon and Glow (sample), 2011

Sarah Gotowka, How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore

by Pam Mackenzie

Running throughout the month of January, Concordia Masters student Sarah Gotowka will merge material craft and the language of cyberspace in the darkness of the FOFA's black box, recreating the impression of virtual space through an encounter with handwoven glow-in-the-dark scoubidou. The image exhibited will be of a sad face emoticon, laboriously constructed by weaving boondoggle, a material originally marketed for use in children's craft.

In her work Gotowka acts as an anthropologist, approaching recent technological trends and their impact on the western community through new methods of interpersonal communication. Of particular interest in this piece is the condensed and impersonal format of the text message and the use of emoticons to convey intimate gestures. In this case we recognize the intensity of emotion relating to romance and heartbreak too often reduced to a symbolic blip. However, through an extensive workover in the medium of traditional craft, Gotowka expands and elaborates the temporal and spatial significance of these generally flat and immaterial messages. She re-contextualizes virtual emotional signifiers within the history of human relationship to cloth, where it is often embedded with symbolic and linguistic motifs that represent their cultural production.

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1 - this is reference to Prince's 1982 ballad