Part performance, mural and sculpture, Walls to the Ball is a process-based installation that will unfold at La Centrale over a four-week period. Starting from an imagined meeting of Anni Albers (Bauhaus trained weaver) and Dirk Nowitzki (NBA MVP), Walls to the Ball pits basketball and textile-based craft in a ‘head-to-head’ about their overlooked similarities.

An immersive wall drawing will span the gallery’s walls and floor, along with handmade banners and nets will transform the space into an idiosyncratic gymnasium/workroom. As much a way of working as it is a body of work, the project champions sport and craft as a potent and meaningful way to engage the nuanced relationship between gender and value. Walls to the Ball circumvents macho idioms like ‘balls to the wall’ with equal parts absurdity, play and hardcore persistence. As a process, Walls to the Ball is messy, fallible and prone to cramps; yet, it has endurance, stamina and a geographically irrelevant home team advantage- that shit is real!

During Walls to the Ball, visitors will be invited to engage in SSSG (Skill-Shares Shared as Gifs). By using the format of the repeating gif, the public will be encouraged to contribute to a bank of sport and craft knowledge by making their own instructional gif, connecting both activities to repetition, practice and persistence.

In addition, Ponytail Express (Meyer’s sportscast for the ‘athletically apathetic’) will be taping a Montréal edition live in-gallery.

Hazel Meyer is an artist and sports enthusiast based in Toronto, Canada. Committed to both a socially engaged and material-based practice she negotiates these primarily through creating installations that become environments for performance, workshops and amateur athletics. She has a BFA from Concordia University in Montréal, an MFA from OCAD University in Toronto, and presently is artist-in-residence at Toronto high schools through The Pedagogic Impulse. Recent exhibitions include Schlaegermusik, with Annesley Black for Zukunftsmusik in Stuttgart, Walls to the Ball, at Struts Gallery in Sackville, and All Hands on the Archive : An Audience of Enablers Cannot Fail, with Logan McDonald at F.A.G. in Toronto. Upcoming projects involve taking Walls to the Ball to St. John’s and Saskatoon, exhibiting What I Talk About When I Talk About Weaving at WARC, Toronto, and a forthcoming graphic novel Pattern Slander: A semiautobiographical account of disease, shit and repeat-patterns.