Curatorial Work
"All Hours" at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2020)
As a Criticism and Curatorial Practice MFA candidate, I had the opportunity to work collaboratively with curators at the Art Gallery of Ontario to develop and execute a full day of programming for ALL HOURS, an all ages, one-day pop-up event. We worked directly with several artists to program and activate the gallery spaces throughout the museum.
Lindsay Dobbin's sound and video work, Arrival, installed in the Henry Moore Centre
Headlining R&B singer-songwriter a l l i e performing
Storytime with Faye and Fluffy
Performance by Nostos Collective
@shitfireplace Installation
"connection_found" by feelSpace Curatorial (2019)
feelSpace is an ad-hoc interdisciplinary curatorial collective interested in the implications and potential of curatorial practice within, through, and around digital spaces.
"connection_found" is an online group exhibition organized by feelSpace featuring works by Ronnie Clarke, Taylor Jolin, Leia Kook-Chun, Madeleine Lychek and Paula Tovar, Noelle Wharton-Ayer, and Becca Wijshijer. At times humorous, and other times tender, these meditations illustrate the quirks of navigating intimacy in the digital realm as it inadvertently relates back to the body in the physical world.
As the name connection_found implies, the works within this exhibition understand connection and intimacy in broad subsets: a found connection between an individual and their complicated cultural history (Wharton-Ayer), between lovers separated by an ocean (Lychek and Tovar), between strangers online (Kook-Chun), between the corporeal and the digital (Clarke), between where we are and where we’ve never been (Jolin), and with alternate versions of ourselves (Wijshijer). Together, these works trace and re-trace digital intimacy, touch, and the body as it moves and navigates towards the virtual realm.
More literally, connection_found also suggests the curatorial alignment of these works in a digital context which, in and of itself, requires finding connection. At the core of the exhibition, connection_found simultaneously expands, individuates, and links the collective experience of existing on the internet.
L Stands for Lover by Madeleine Lychek and Paula Tovar, a work from their joint series @sapphicpangea on Instagram
Fragment of Blue Garden Hand by Noelle Wharton-Ayer
Still from Paper Plane Poetry, a digital interactive artwork by Leia Kook-Chun
Fragment of Remote Viewing diptych I by Taylor Jolin
Video still of Surface Waltz by Ronnie Clarke
Video still of Top 5 Things to do in Berlin by Becca Wijshijer
York Lane Art Collective Artist Residency (2018)
During a 2-month residency, I developed a portfolio of collage work that was then curated in a public group exhibition in the studio, converted to a gallery space.
Studio Installation
As both a studio and a gallery, my collage installation was installed throughout the residency, evolving as work was produced.
About the work
The installation represents an ongoing impulse toward experimentation with colour, form, and space, with the wall itself becoming the final collage as each individual work finds a place within something larger than itself.
The legacy of collage extends back to the Modernist period, where artists such as Georges Braque and Hannah Höch began gathering and recombining fragments of images and other found objects on a surface. At the turn of the century and specifically after WWI, artists were looking for new ways to express and digest the new world they found themselves living in. Collage thrived as a medium within the Surrealist and Dada movements as a way to activate artwork as more clearly responsive to political and social discourse and critique. Hannah Höch is an especially important point of reference for me as a Dada collage artist in the early 20th century, and one of the only women whose work was recognized throughout the period. As one of the originators of photomontage, Höch used images from fashion magazines and illustrated journals to create work that challenged the racist and sexist codes of the time, instead creating representations of strong and independent women.
Höch's work was inspiring to a later generation of second-wave feminist artists who used collage to destabilize and redefine the meaning of images proliferated by the media and informed by patriarchal structures. In my collages, I aim to honour that feminine historical repository by revealing and undoing the complex and often problematic entanglements of gender, race, sexuality, and class as it appears for consumption, instead cutting and pasting alternative ways of being in the world.
"Protectorate 1" at ArtLab Gallery (2017)
Since the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969, humans have been leaving objects on the moon. Recently, NASA and others have begun to think about protecting these "artefacts." But the moon belongs to no one, and even suggesting that it become a heritage site raises the spectres of colonization and exploitation, and hints at the potentially destructive impacts of space tourism and resource extraction.
Set in 2085, this exhibition invites visitors to explore "Protectorate 1", a curatorial project that teases out issues of heritage preservation alongside corporate sponsorship, "edutainment," and space tourism.
