Hosted by the Centre for Feminist Pedagogy (CFP) (Ania Wroblewski and Jen Kennedy), TRADE SCHOOL was a day-­ long moneyless marketplace that was free and open to the public.

TRADE SCHOOL welcomed any form of potlatch...clothing swaps, community kitchens, knitting circles, babysitting, reading groups, music lessons, lending libraries and book swaps, yoga lessons, drawing lessons, language lessons, collective art projects, bike repairs, tutoring, editing, translation, making and dying fabrics, paper making, origami, pop-­up exhibitions, grant writing, acting, mime, and almost anything else...

I was invited to present a dyeing workshop How to Dye in Style, as a textile artist and funeral director. Participants were introduced to accessible and easy to use dyes that would give new life to older articles of clothing. We dyed dresses, scarves, socks, shirts and yarn using Rit, Dylon and Tulip Permanent Fabric Dyes.

The Artlab Gallery is pleased to announce that they will be starting off the fall 2013 season with the opening of their Faculty/Staff exhibition, SAMPLE.

The Exhibition provides students and members of the community with the opportunity to view recent work created by Studio Faculty and Staff. In conjunction with this exhibition, Faculty members teaching art history will present their scholarly research in the form of recent publications and published papers.

UC Gallery is pleased to present the work of local artist René Vandenbrink who received a BFA in studio from the Department of Visual Arts, Western University in 2010.

Jennifer Lorraine Fraser's exhibition Awards at the OCADU Graduate Gallery was held March 4 – 10, 2016.

Her exhibition, Awards, incorporated archival reproductions, acknowledgment of forced labor within asylums, and known lifestyle choices of incarcerated women; along with contemporary artistic practice used to raise questions about societal expectations of women and of their disciplining. Eight artists, respond to Fraser's research: Ana Čop, Anna Copa Cabanna, Britta Fluevlog, Gillian Dykeman, Jamey Braden, Kristina Guison, Paddy Jane, and Rene Vandenbrink. Resulting in a co-construction of research, contemplation and response to the history of women being unethically incarcerated.

Rene Vandenbrink's hand spun and hand dyed yarns were purchased by Gabriella Solti and Lynette de Montreuil for their Forging Communities project with 246 members of London and the surrounding area. The threads and yarns were part of the collaboration in paper sculpture and paper art workshops created by participants.

Jennifer Lorraine Fraser's The Shoebox Gallery catalogue features exhibitions by Sarah Scope, Bill Nace, Rene Vandenbrink and Ashley Snook in her experimental micro museum the shoe box gallery.

Kimberly Barton's article Quiet Riot: The Maker Artist Making Noise With Small Sculptures reviews the exhibition Leftovers by Rene Vandenbrink at the shoe box gallery in Toronto, Ontario. Her article is based on an interview with Vandenbrink regarding her art practice and the experimental gallery space created by Jennifer Lorraine Fraser.

This article was written for Good Trouble Magazine. Good Trouble is a digital and print magazine looking through the lens of arts and culture at protest and activism around the world. It shows resistance in all its beauty, humour and contradictions, because life is messy and serious business can be fun. The Good Trouble website is a cultural hub sharing interviews, stories, photos, resources, art, documentaries, music and DIY projects.

Jennifer Lorraine Fraser's shoe box gallery in Toronto, Ontario exhibited Leftovers in April, 2017.

Leftovers residing at the shoe box gallery celebrate small collections. Each white cube of the shoe box gallery creates a home to objects that were once part of larger collections. Though incomplete, each collection's power to invoke vivid memories remains strong and their form holds potential for story telling. Through placement, narratives are created within the new walls of their existence. The origins of the collections are varied. Some of the collections come from towering vegetation along a local creek, a debris riddled beach along a great lake, a ditch along a prairie highway, a rock pile along the base of a mountain and a hilly graveyard along the ocean. A few of the collections are made up of inherited objects that were no longer needed by relatives or friends yet were well crafted, too kitschy to be true, or of some imagined historical importance. One collection memorializes an occupation within an industry that was difficult to navigate and the garments I wore everyday to work at a funeral parlour, were kept and transformed. These collections are combined with textile collections that were acquired through hand me downs, yard sales and boulevard waste. These threads, yarns, lace, ribbons and yardage are meaningful leftover collections themselves and used to wrap other objects adding colour and comfort to their incomplete existence. Leftovers are discarded by some as they are no longer new; their original design has been fulfilled and they will just go bad in the fridge. Though the collections grow dusty and take up more space than I have to give, they are worthy of the space and I don't dust anyway. They are cherished, sometimes more than the first time they were experienced, because that original moment is gone, inaccessible and this gives way to embellishment.