September 16th is the opening night for Mike Macri’s exhibition at Catalog Gallery in Gastown. He’ll be showing twelve 8″ x 10″ needlepoint portraits of Canadian hockey goalies. Yes, you read that correctly, needlepoint portraits! Each piece takes roughly 80 hours to complete, and the end results are something to behold. After hearing about Mike’s upcoming show from recently profiled artist Zoe Pawlak, we got in touch with him to ask a few questions about his unique and timely show (hockey pre-season starts Sept. 20th!).

A bit about Mike from Mike first…

Like many boys growing up in Canada, hockey was a pervasive force in my childhood. When I wasn’t watching it, I was playing hockey in the street, reading about it in well-worn books in the school library, trading hockey cards back and forth with other similarly absorbed kids in the neighborhood.

The players we watched were the ultimate denotation of masculinity – the ever- present threat of a broken bone (the most threatening scenario my 10 year old brain could imagine) never seemed the prove a big enough deterrent to prevent these men from throwing life and limb in front of a frozen piece of rubber. Of these men, the goaltenders were always the most intriguing. Singled out by nature of the position, these players not only put themselves at risk, it was a requisite part of their job. At a point in my life where danger and masculinity conflated into one hard-edged amalgam, the hockey goaltender stood above the rest.

An effort to trace back to these roots and beyond, this body of work depicts a number of goaltenders, of varying degrees of success and fame, during a time (1967-70) in which the National Hockey League first expanded from six to twelve teams. The Original Six teams now traveled across the continent, facing off against teams clad in bright yellows and greens – a marked contrast to the blacks, primary blues and reds of the original league members. The game, as it was known, was permanently altered (now in Technicolor).

Ultimately, this work looks to address a subconscious lamentation for a perceived loss of the mytho-paternal, by way of a rupture in the established semiotics of masculinity.

Depicting hockey players through the medium of needlepoint is an interesting intersection of worlds. How did you arrive there?

I started experimenting with needlepoint during my final year at UBC. I was doing these relatively crude renderings of celebrity mugshots. That project dealt with gender identity in a more general sense but I guess I wanted to extend that work into a more personal arena. Growing up a hockey fan, it seemed like a logical place to start. I was also listening to The Weakerthans song “Elegy for Gump Worsley” and there’s a line “He looked more like our fathers, not a goalie, player, athlete period.” I wanted to work with the idea of these guys who seemed to be surrogate father figures to a generation to the point that they became almost mythic.

You say that the crux of your work is an exploration of your own relationship with the concept of masculinity. Does addressing this topic in this medium get you closer or further away from any semblance of understanding that?

I’m still not sure if I could give you (or myself) a cogent answer to that question. I’m working with the knowledge that there exists a historical context to this medium, whether it be craft or otherwise; but at a certain point the action becomes so mechanical and the image becomes so detailed that there’s almost an obliteration of any concept of preciousness or delicateness. Maybe using the word ‘obliteration’ when talking about needlepoint traces a line back to the masculine.

Ever play hockey?

I played a couple years of ice hockey as a teenager, and like most kids I played street hockey whenever I could.

Where did you pick up needlepoint?

From my mom. She used to do it when I was a kid, and maybe something about that resonated with me for some reason. When I thought about doing it for a piece in school, she gave me all the supplies and showed me how it worked. I’d like to think that’s more or less the way the hobby typically gets passed along (although the mother-to-son handoff might be a little more atypical), so I’m glad there was at least some semblance of authenticity or genuineness to the process.

A lot of the players that you chose to focus on (especially Tony Esposito) are mythic to a particular generation of hockey fans. Why only expansion era teams?

I think I touched on that a bit earlier, but that period of time (1967-70) was one in which it seems like everything changed without changing all that much. The game was more or less the same, but all of a sudden you have these teams suiting up in bright yellow and purple and the semiotics of the sport are changed. Having not grown up in that era, I can only guess, but I imagine there was a lamentation for the time before expansion, when players wore red or blue and the game was in Detroit, not Los Angeles.

I have to ask – any chance that you might add a Canuck to the line-up?

Being a huge Canuck fan, I’ve wanted to do one, but the team came as a part of the second wave of expansion. I imagine a Richard Brodeur or a Curt Ridley piece would go over well, but they were a couple years too late. Maybe I’ll do a Kirk McLean piece for myself. I did do a Charlie Hodge piece though. He played for the Canucks a little later on.

Check out Mike’s show at Catalog in Gastown starting September 16th.