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Soozie Schlanger

Works

  • Take a relaxing walk along an Ontario beach. Here’s what you might expect to see - water and sand and ducks and maybe some beach goers enjoying summer and lying on blankets in their most attractive and alluring beachwear. Here is what you don’t want to see, but in fact do see - plastic waste floating in the water, beer cans sticking out of the sand and mountains of cigarette butts. The beach is being used by many as a great big ashtray. I am addressing this negligence in a piece entitled Beachwear. A plaster cast of a woman’s swim suit is adorned with cigarette butts. They are organized in a simple, daisy pattern, which from a distance appears not unlike any ordinary benign pattern one might find on a pretty, summer garment. Masses of cigarette butts line the inside of this ‘fabric’ - random and disorganized - like menacing layers of toxic threads on the underside of a piece of cloth. While maintaining a feminine structural form, the body of the piece is left deliberately ’unfinished’ - cavernous and skeletal. Beachwear is blatantly and disturbingly ironic. While swimming, bathing and water in general connote a sense of health and cleanliness, this piece deliberately reflects quite the opposite. In effect, it is Mother Nature’s bathing suit.

  • You turn on the taps and out pour cigarette butts instead of water.

    Now will you stop abusing our waterways!?


About

Soozi Schlanger is a Toronto born multi-dimensional artist. Story telling is at the heart of her work in both the musical and visual spheres. Her writing was recently published in the Toronto Globe and Mail (2021, Master Kim) and she is currently working on writing and illustrating a number stories for both children and adults. For the past 5 years, she has been developing an art form for portraiture - tape art - working with coloured tape in place of paint.

Discarded/recycled/found objects have been an important part of her artistic ‘amo’ from early childhood. In the 1970’s, she founded Kaleidoscope, a recycle art program for parents and children a Harbourfront - a program still in progress. From 1985 -1990 she taught portraiture and sculpture at Central Technical School and since 1997 has led Toronto’s Cajun band Swamperella. In 2013 Soozi launched a music project of original material, ‘soozimusic.

Soozi Schlanger is largely self taught in all her artistic ventures. ‘I believe creativity is our innate truth...we are born with it...we just have to remember how to ‘play’...and then without judgement or inhibition dive in and just go for it!’

Website: soozischlanger.com


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