Art and Archive: Reflections from the Information Desk

 Exhibition Reviews | Rachel Deiterding

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Having worked in numerous museums and galleries, I somehow always managed to avoid gallery sitting…. until this fall. In September 2021, I was one of two gallery sitters at Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective at the Art Gallery of York University. For a month I spent 18 hours a week looking at the show, telling people about the show, and learning more about all its hidden secrets. I can’t think of many exhibitions that I’ve visited more than once, let alone spent more than 72 hours with, but the perpetual proximity of gallery sitting, this long-term visiting, had a way of revealing the life of the exhibition. I was watching it grow and listening to it breathe. It felt personal. Maybe like it was watching me back? 

Central to Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective were the ideas of performance and archive. Jess Dobkin is a Toronto-based performance artist whose work facilitates uncomfortable encounters and is often created in dialogue with community. Using relics of past performances, the works were reimagined to produce multiple iterations of what a performance archive might look like. The exhibition was fueled by the tension of simultaneously looking at the past, the present, and the future. Thinking about the afterlife of the archive, the exhibition “demands of archives what we expect from performance: the live encounter of experience in a ritual of transformation.” (Emelie Chhangur, 2021)

Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective, installation view, 2021 | Documentation by Yuula Benivolski |  Source

 

The thing about spending so much time with a show is that you start to form an intimate relationship with the space. Initially, the space felt overwhelming. There was so much to look at that each time you entered new details emerged, elements I had never seen before. The consistency of these discoveries was almost comical. Like the exhibition itself was consciously sharing these details, leaving these easter eggs, posing questions, and forcing reflection. Soon it felt absurd that someone might visit the show only once, walk through in 20-minutes or less and never return, leaving stones unturned.

Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective, installation view, 2021 | Documentation by Yuula Benivolski |  Source

My favourite parts were the corners. Not only is this where many of the plugs were hidden, which I used to power up the exhibition each day and tuck it in for the night, but the corners also housed messy bits of the archive, teeming with life - a mix of loose sketches, notes, another ephemera. A seemingly uncatalogued history, but a history nonetheless. Beyond getting acquainted with the energy of the space, gallery sitting also brings you into an interesting relationship with visitors. Interacting with each person, you learn a bit about them and, through that interaction, a little bit about the show. In the second week of September, as students were returning to campus, a family of four came into the gallery. After I warned them of the show's mature content, the mother and daughter went in, warily, and the father and the young son waited outside. While the father bragged about his daughter entering university and the success she was sure to find as a landscape painter, she emerged from the gallery, eyes wide. “That was vulgar,” she said. “Exactly,” I said. The space told me nothing more was required. We blinked at each other. Sometimes people get it and sometimes they don't.

Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective, installation view, 2021 | Documentation by Yuula Benivolski |  Source

Perhaps it was the performative nature of the show that made it feel alive. Or the archivists that animated the back room, producing a constant physical presence. But even with the gallery empty and the lights off, there was a sense of tension in the space. Like it was waiting for me to turn my back to come alive, to get into all kinds of archival imagining and experiments. It felt a bit like Toy Story. Of course, this didn’t happen, but at the same time, maybe it did? One evening I got an email from a colleague. It was a "gallery update" that concluded by saying: “I should let you know that one of the boobs in the lactation bar isn’t working very well, so we have one boob working fine and the other is dribbling. I guess it's more relatable? Like its more realistic to actual breast feeding? Idk.” As I was refilling the fish tank that powered the lactating breasts the next morning I knew that the exhibition was alive, that it was playing a bit of a prank on me. I was grateful for it. 

These details had almost slipped from my memory. I chalked them up to too much introspection; it’s just gallery sitting after all. It wasn’t until I was in a new gallery, in a new exhibition that I started to feel the viscerality of the space again, a connection being formed. Undoubtedly, exhibitions take on their own lives, and we have much to learn by being attentive to them. So, here I am, sitting in more exhibitions and trying to look and listen closely to uncover just what they might be trying to tell me.

GROUNDWORK AND THE ANIMACY OF STONE

 Exhibition Reviews | Rachel Deiterding

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In human timescales, stone signifies unwavering permanence. As Jeffery Jerome Cohen unearths the animacy of stone, he asks “if stone could speak, what would it say about us?” While seemingly speculative, his inquiry asks us to re-imagine our relationship to the earth and introduces us to rock bodies as agents. When I first encountered this question it was earth-shattering. It shifted the way that I understood the world and my position within it.  I was no longer a scientific ecological observer, but a collaborative member of a vast network of ecosystems made up of complex relations. This was the first step in a continued journey of confronting and unlearning colonial understandings of land, ownership, and extraction. My research has since been focused on bridging the gap between the human and the non-human, learning from Indigenous stewards of the lands on which I am a guest, and building relationships that are based in deep localized reciprocity. I have a new language to learn – we all do – and stone has much to teach us if we could only learn how to listen. 

Groundwork, installation view, 2021 | Photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid | Source

Exploring extractivism as a physical process and a mindset, Groundwork is on view at Critical Distance Centre for Curators (from May to August 2021). The exhibition goes beyond merely drawing attention to extraction to think about how performance can be mobilized to challenge and reconfigure our relationships to land using methods of camouflage and infiltration. 

Upon entering, an ambient soundtrack flows through the exhibition space. Its uncanny and alien resonances set the tone for the barren landscapes decimated by extraction and the uneven power relationships between human and non-human beings that underpin the work. Alana Bartol’s Orphan Well Adoption Agency (2017–ongoing) manifests an oil and gas company interested in the decommissioning and reclamation of abandoned oil wells that continue to pollute the landscape. In her video TOTAL FIELD (2017), she is dressed in blue, her vision is blocked with ping pong ball goggles, and she is carrying a mysterious forked branch. She is dowsing, a practice linked to her ancestry where a tool of divination is used to help locate water, oil, and minerals through the pull of the earth. Her performance has a dual function, she explores her own complicated familial relationship with extraction while also performing a close reading of the land to assess its levels of contamination. As an alternative mode of understanding the land, dowsing requires deep listening and a body attuned with the earth to identify and decipher the language of the land that circulates outside of human vocabularies. The work calls for new methods of listening rooted outside of colonial modes of understanding.

Alana Barol, OWAA Uniform and Tools, 2017 | Photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid | Source

As caretakers and stewards, how can we better learn to listen to the earth and find the patience to undergo the process of translation? In English, a noun-based language, we classify the earth as a thing, something to possess and act upon rather than something that acts itself. We don’t have the language to understand the behaviour of the earth, its non-human inhabitants, and their animacy. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes her experience learning Potawatomi, pointing out that 70% of the language is verbs. In this context, language shifts everything, bringing the world to life. Suddenly a rock is not simply a rock but is in the act of being a rock, illustrating the underlying animacy of all non-human things.

If the earth is alive and speaking to us, do we not have the responsibility to listen? Tsēmā Igharas' to protect the womb from x-rays and colonization (2017) features armour constructed from moosehide and copper pennies. The discontinued Canadian currency, extracted from Igharas' home territory of Tahltan Nation where copper mines have wreaked environmental havoc, draws attention to violent histories of extraction and land use. Furthermore, it draws on the potential for constructing realms of safety and balance when natural materials are accessed consciously and with respect for the broader network of relations to which they belong.

Tsēmā Igharas, Photograph: Re Naturalize no. 7, 2015-2016, Sculpture: to protect the womb from x-rays and colonization, 2018 | Photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid | Source

Returning to Cohen’s question of “if stone could speak, what would it say about us,” Ileana Hernandez Camacho's Corps roca (2018–ongoing) gives voice to stone, taking it on as a character and playfully interrogating the relationship between humans and the earth. Presenting rocks as living thinking beings, Hernandez Camacho constructs an alternative understanding of extraction, one where the earth has the agency to speak back, to voice its opinion, and to make its agency visible and naturalized. 

Ileana Henandez, Corps roca, 2018 | Photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid | Source

Throughout the exhibition, the artist's bodies are directly evoking and distilling alternative conceptions of land. The viewer is invited to participate by standing on Corps roca’s vibrating platform alongside one of the stone costumes. As the buzz of stone vibrated through my feet, I was reminded that I have much to do. The work not only challenges the way we think about land, but it also calls us to action. 

Stone has been on earth far longer than any of us, and it is a teacher that holds a wealth of knowledge. How can we be better listeners and learners? Beyond listening, how might we speak back and be better participants in the relations that support and sustain us? All in all, how might the alternatives displayed together in this show assist in reframing the hierarchical language of extraction which dominates colonial societies? While the impact of listening alone has proven limited, Groundwork reminds us of our responsibility to the earth and asks us to take up deeper listening, a shift in language, and a change in mindset. 

YOU JUST HOLD YOUR BREATH: BATHING, SWIMMING, AND STATES OF BODILY IMMERSION AT THE PLUMB

 Exhibition Reviews | Rachel Deiterding

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As a child, I was obsessed with the lake. The allure of the water lies in its dichotomy of sustenance and destruction, along with its role as a liminal space that calls for transformation and reflection, joy and loss. My grandfather had a complicated relationship with lakes and rivers, the natural architectures of bathing. On a hot July day, you might have caught him dipping his toes in the shallows of Lake Ontario, hanging on tightly to the metal staircase we installed for ease of descent. After losing two siblings to the tides, the shallows where my sister and I played, pulling zebra mussels off the rocks, sparked a steadfast and enduring fear. I was always excited to see him there on the steps, wondering if he might enter our joyful watery realm. But he always retreated, and I always felt that he was profoundly missing out. The watery architectures of self-care and the complexities of liquid leisure explored in You Just Hold Your Breath point out that there is much to be uncovered in watery spaces.

You just hold your breath, installation view, 2021 | Photo documentation by Alison Postma and Miles Rufelds | Source

On view at the plumb until July 27th, You Just Hold Your Breath “focuses on aesthetic experiences of bathing, swimming and states of bodily immersion, invoking the porous and soluble relationships that exist between self and environment” (Laura Demers, 2021). Taking public bathing spaces as a starting point, You Just Hold Your Breath provokes an unexpected and nuanced exploration of water, bathing, and leisure in our public and private lives. 

Damp spaces of gathering promise a certain kind of togetherness as they merge the public and the private, lodging us into a state of vulnerability where we are at the whims of the people and the places that surround us. This corporal experience is evoked throughout the exhibition, beginning with Jovian’s POOL, a psychoactive custom blended diffuser oil that recalls the interior of a well-used wooden sauna. With scent-triggered memories, steamy glasses, and sweat on my neck from the bike up to St. Clair, I am primed to enter Olivia Boudreau’s L’Étuve. Walking down the dark tiled hallway feels a bit like wandering down the winding corridors of a community pool. The only thing missing is the sound of wet feet slapping the tiled floors. Boudreau’s 20-minute video work takes its time, transporting the viewer into the timelines of leisure, reflection, and individualized self-care. As time passes, more bodies appear in the steam and the viewer is made a participant. Caught up in their own lives, the women sit idly. Still, except for the occasional twitch of a toe, shift of a knee, or hair adjustment. I stand, also waiting, also silent, also shifting. In this case, the sauna, a shared space of leisure and rejuvenation is punctuated with the individualism of daily life that persists both within and outside of leisure. Dale Barbour, a historian of bathing in the Don River from 1890 to 1930, reveals how a communal spirit of leisure was prominent, connecting the bathers and protecting them from the undertow and irregular riverbed (Barbour, 2019). In this example, an embodied relationship with one’s environment and an awareness of one's neighbours were essential to bathing practices. Reflecting on the silent steam room, how do we build modern moments of community that disrupt our individualistic pursuits of self-care? And how might self-care also translate to communities of care?

 

Olivia Boudreau, L'Éteuve, 2011, video still | Source

Turning to exit the hallway, I pause to read the textual portion of Alex Borkowski’s The Hydrocephalus Suite. An audio narration of the piece spills from the second gallery, drawing the spaces together. I am struck by Borkowski’s ritual description of bathing as rooted in the familiar memory of her grandmother, the necessity of a particular tub, and of particular objects. The ritual connection associated with self-care is further developed in Izzy Mink’s unfired clay sculptures. Studies of the development of her personal relationship with her body, self-care, and bathing, these works render the familiar uncanny and subvert notions of clean and grotesque. Among the lineup of objects, I keep returning to crestfallen, a pair of dentures in a glass of water. The submerged unfired clay teeth are visibly deteriorating as they split away from the beeswax gums.

Izzy Mink, crestfallen, 2021 | Photo documentation by Alison Postma and Miles Rufelds | Source 

The glass is not dissimilar from the case in which my grandfather stored his own dentures. Perhaps his acts of community building were not based in watery environments of leisure, but in watery architectures that support community as a means of collective care. A man who experienced disability throughout his life and was outfitted with dentures, a glass eye, and limited use of his right hand, his rituals of bathing and self-care were deeply dependent on love and community support. For years he built networks of relationships, connecting family members, close friends, nurses, and personal support workers through his unending good humor and the acts of rinsing his eye, cleaning his catheter, and performing other intimate tasks. Perhaps he was never missing out at all.

You just hold your breath is on view until July 27th. As we recover from a year of online school, I urge those in Toronto over the summer to make time for this impactful show. Much like the communities of leisure and care that the show evokes, the plumb itself is a DIY artist-run space administered by a collective made up of 15 artists, writers, and curators. Providing 1000 square feet of exhibition space, the plumb’s programming showcases the work of emerging artists, putting them in dialogue with established voices in the artistic community. 

RETURNING TO TRIUMPHANT ALLIANCE OF THE UBIQUITOUS BLOSSOMS OF INCARNATE SOULS

Exhibition Reviews | Rachel Deiterding

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As the sun returns and spring blossoms emerge, I keep returning to Tau Lewis’ Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls. I was fortunate enough to visit this show in October 2020 while it was on exhibit at Cooper Cole in one of the short periods that galleries were open to the public. Lewis’ figurative sculptures capture history through found materials, explore the experience of the Black diaspora, and imagine new geographies for black existence. The work featured in Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls makes an aesthetic pivot from Lewis' past work while continuing to uphold visual and thematic through lines that distinctly identify the work. When I saw the show as summer turned to fall it felt pertinent, linked to the time and the place. Now as I reflect on it months later, it feels similarly relevant as we unfold into spring. 

Tau Lewis, Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls, 2020 | Source

The show was nothing short of magnificent. Its power was equally expressed in the digital documentation that circulated online and on social media. The images exuded an otherworldly aura, the tactility of the textiles called for touch, and the scale demanded physical interaction in the space. 

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is invited into the realm of the T.A.U.B.I.S. This realm is a pocket of the universe dedicated to justice, fertile abundance, care, and communal knowledge. These themes are personified in the three main sculptural figures located in the gallery and its extended space. 

The work takes on a particular aesthetic through its materials. Lewis works with found textile materials and this body of work was made from reclaimed household items such as bed linens, clothing, blankets, and towels. The materials were then all hand-dyed in pastel hues and meticulously hand-stitched to produce the resulting forms. The warm pastel colour palette is described as being “meant to resemble a light-filled womb.” Stepping into the space from a cool fall day was like stepping to your grandmother’s kitchen, bustling with safety and intergenerational wonder. 

The pull of the material was strong and there was nothing I wanted to do more than sit safely under the figure's skirt.

Tau Lewis, Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls, 2020 | Source

Tau Lewis, Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls, 2020 | Source

At the same time as these ethereal beings felt warm and connected, they remained out of reach, each surrounded by a curtain and of blossoms hanging from the ceiling. Visitors had to maneuver between them, careful not to cause a disruption as the blossoms responded to human presences in the space. The blossoms served to both connect and distance. The keepers of the realm. 

Tau Lewis, Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls, 2020 | Source

In the gallery basement, another figure sits tucked into the back corner. Almost hidden, it seems to be waiting for you to come find it. With an outstretched arm it beckons you closer. The mysterious power evoked by the object is succinctly described in Kaya Joan’s interpretation where they describe the figure “as a conduit between worlds.” The room felt statically charged, as if an outstretched hand could only mean one thing. 

Tau Lewis, Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls, 2020 | Source

To access the final element of the show, the visitor has to be escorted by a gallery attendant down the street and into a storage unit facility. The journey takes you into a parking garage, up an elevator, and a down a fluorescently lit hallway lined with white garage doors. A disorienting and unexpected journey that leads to an equally mystifying universe. A towering head overtakes the room and an outstretched tongue is unfurled onto the floor. The figure seems to be all-knowing while at the same time offering a space to rest. A pair of feet poke out the mouth, toes interwoven with flowers. 

A common theme in Tau’s past work is an exploration of the potential for an emotive transference from found materials. The magical world that Lewis has created seems to harnessed the warmth, safety and wisdom of the domestic worlds they were collected from to create a space of love and belonging. In October I was struck by the sense that I might like to live here among these mysterious soft pastel beings. Months later, I'd still like that. 

Tau Lewis, Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous
 Blossoms of Incarnate Souls, 2020 | Source

Tau Lewis, Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous
Blossoms of Incarnate Souls, 2020 | Source

See the full digital archive of the work here!

May we all return to museums and galleries soon. 

 

THERE ARE TIMES AND PLACES: ONLINE EXHIBITIONS BEFORE ONLINE EXHIBITIONS WERE A THING

Exhibition Reviews | Rachel Deiterding

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Digital exhibitions have become a common and expected alternative in the current era where we have been unable to view art in person. However, the form of the online exhibition is longstanding and there are many projects that have been working to define the genre well before the onset of the pandemic. Koffler.Digital is one such example. A free online program associated with the Koffler Centre for the Arts, Koffler.Digital has been producing digital programming since 2016. This digital space has two key initiatives, first to provide space for experimentation in digital mediums, and second to create space for conversations at the intersection of social justice and artistic practice from a range of perspectives. 

In October 2019, Koffler.Digital launched There are Times and Places, curated by Letticia Cosbert Miller. The exhibition showcases work by Wuulhu, Mani Mazinani, Coco Guzmán, asinnajaq, and Dayna Danger to reflexively explore the way that we interact in digital spaces and how the internet both functions and fails to create alternative spaces for building community and sharing knowledge. This exhibition uses the digital realm to create an exhibition space that is essential to the show and irreplicable in a physical gallery space.

"Enter There are Times and Places" Button. [source]

Upon entering the exhibition site, the visitor is confronted with a colourful home screen full of movement reminiscent of an early 2000’s Tumblr page ornamented with floating cursor-sensitive graphs, an assortment of raining emojis, and a periodic droning ambient track. As you begin to scroll through the content it becomes clear that the page is fully outfitted with early internet iconography including a roflcopter and the infamous dancing banana gif. 

There are Times and There are Places, Title Page. [source]

Viewers can scroll through the page to access the four digital projects that make up the exhibition or use the 8-bit inspired navigation bar at the top of the window. 

The curatorial essay, Time, Place and Cyberspace: who gets to play and how written by Emma Steen begins with a pair of questions from Metis Cree filmmaker and director Loretta Todd posed in 1996. She asks “what ideology will have agency in cyberspace?” And further, “will cyberspace enable people to communicate in ways that rupture the power relations of the colonizer and the colonized.” This inquiry reveals the goals of the exhibition which seeks to question the power dynamics of online spaces and beyond this, use the digital medium to make art accessible to audiences that are often left out of formalized art spaces. In this space, viewers are free to interact with the work on their own terms, unobstructed by the pressures and gatekeeping of the art world. The work purposefully complicates the boundaries between the artist and the viewer by emphasizing viewer interpretation, interaction, and participation with the work.

Wuulhu, Emergency Indingeous Meme Machine, 2019. [source] 

Of the four projects, Coco Guzmán’s What is that? stands out with its humorous tongue-in-cheek approach. The work simulates an imagined archaeological dig by aliens after all humans have "died by each other's hand" in the not-so-distant future. Upon entering an animated archeological site, the visitor selects where to dig and is presented with a piece of technology and three interpretations by the alien civilization exploring earth. The visitor then makes a selection, cementing this interpretation onto the newly occupied land. Upon unearthing a polaroid camera, the game asks, “what is this?” “A very weird experience.” “A mirror that is always late.” “Or a very rude thing that sticks out its tongue.” While the options are both cute and humorous, they reflect on modes of knowledge production and the way that understandings of the world and communities can be misinterpreted and shift over time. 

Coco Guzmán, What is that?, 2019. [source]

Unlike the other three works in the show which are highly interactive, asinnajaq and Dayna Danger’s video Intimacy Piece returns the audience to the position of a viewer but keeps them close through the pull of mystery. A zoomed-in black and white video rests on a pool of water zoomed in on a pair of figures that never seem to touch. In her curatorial essay, Steen reflects on the tension of this piece stating: “Together we share in the neverending search for something meaningful in a space that is by design devoid of affect.” As we are currently confined to interacting through the internet this piece is especially visceral. As the bodies slide by under the water the viewer is tempted to reach out and touch them, reminded of the paradoxical distance and isolation imposed by the internet as it seemingly holds us together. 

When most online exhibitions simply seem to be in pursuit of replicating physical spaces, the collection of these works in an online format proposes the potential of thinking through the online format in a more intentional way. As I contemplated how these works might come together in a physical space, I was confronted with an image of myself playing on an iPad in an otherwise empty room. These works feel made for the web as they consider the internet as a space of exploration, critique, and interaction. In this case, the online format is of irreplicable value, removing the physical and social boundaries that have barred many from art spaces, in favour of screens and an exploration of interactive digital media to engage a wider range of participants. While There are Times and Places is deeply engaged in developing an open and accessible online space, the influx in online exhibitions has necessitated a critical reflection on the use of digital spaces. While the online realm permits spaces for collaboration and community building among like-minded individuals, Steen points out that “cyberspace remains a space of default whiteness.” Thus, as we consider how the digital world allows marginalized communities to exert personalized agency it is important not to do so without question.

Mani Mazinani, Bounded, 2019. [source]

View the exhibition here, in indefinite cyberspace. 

THE COMMUNITY IS THE GALLERY: “THREE-THIRTY” AT THE DORIS MCCARTHY GALLERY AND BEYOND

Exhibition Reviews | Rachel Deiterding

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While online exhibitions have become the new norm over the past year, there are many exhibitions and media that are not easily transformed for the digital world. Despite this, galleries such as the Doris McCarthy Gallery (DMG) have continued to engage audiences with their in-person offerings without any bodies passing through the gallery space. 

On October 3rd the DMG opened their first exhibition since their unexpected closure due to COVID-19 in March. Three-Thirty, curated by Scarborough native Anique Jordan, features work by Aaron Jones, Kelly Fyfe-Marshall, and Ebti Nabag. For a few short weeks, visitors were able to visit the exhibition in person before the gallery closed its physical space again to limit the transmission of COVID-19. Elements of the exhibition resisted being transformed into an online format. Kelly Fyfe-Marshall’s three-channel video POWER asks Scarborough community members “what does power look like for you in the midst of this moment of revolution?” The conversation that it presents calls for a three-dimensional interaction with the videos as the viewer is swept into the conversation from multiple directions. Creative curatorial approaches that focused on public art and making the exhibition accessible for, and in fact a part of, the wider Scarborough community, allowed some elements of the exhibition to continue to thrive at a distance.

Kelly Fyfe-Marshall, POWER (still from three-channel video installation), 2020. Image: Toni Hafkenscheid. [Source]

As a whole, Three-Thirty focuses on the after-school hour to explore the way that young people assert their authority and more generally, how power is constructed and manipulated in particular spaces. The exhibition is concerned with how individuals influence their environments when they are told that they do not have the power to do so. While the gallery portion of the exhibition is presented at the DMG, Three-Thirty, is also made up of satellite installations at Malvern Public Library and Lester B. Pearson Collegiate which features monumental murals installed on the exterior of each structure. 

These exterior elements kept the exhibition alive in the COVID-19 era, however, they were not built into the exhibition to help keep us apart, but rather to bring the community together. Aaron Jones, worked with the Rita Cox Black and Caribbean Heritage Collection to develop Seeing Knowledge, a series of collages that reflect on alternative models of classifying and building knowledge based in the body and ancestral worlds. The collages were combined to create the 23-foot mural that adorns Malvern Public Library.

Aaron Jones, Seeing Knowledge, 2020. Public installation at the Malvern Public Library. Image: Toni Hafkenscheid. [Source]

Ebti Nabag’s photo-murals were developed with students from Lester B. Pearson Collegiate, depicting them smiling, laughing with friends, in their element, and in control of their own images. Two murals are installed on the exterior of Lester B. Pearson Collegiate, and a third at the DMG. The scale of the murals commands the viewer's attention and conveys the agency of the youth, depicting worlds of seriousness and playfulness where they are in control of the present and the future.

 

Ebti Nabag, Bubble of Youth, 2020. Public installation at Lester B. Pearson Collegiate Institute. Image: Toni Hafkenscheid. [Source]

Together, these murals take on the themes of power and agency taken up by Three-Thirty, while also thinking about where power and decision-making lie in particular communities. While DMG exhibitions are free, the external elements of the exhibition extend notions of accessibility, acknowledging that not all groups represented feel welcome or in control in traditional gallery spaces. Taking the work beyond the physical limits of the gallery and placing them at the epicenter of the wider community functions to promote engagement with art from different audiences and brings these themes into discussion in community spaces rather than exclusively in the gallery. The proximity of the installations also facilitates the opportunity for community members to stop and reflect on their neighbourhood as they move among important local landmarks. Jones and Nabag’s murals embody a sense of empowerment, exuding the agency and knowledge of those who are often cast aside. While they promote discussions surrounding power, agency, and place, they implicitly, and maybe even more powerfully, serve as a reminder of the individual agency of each member of the Scarborough community.

  

Three-Thirty, 2020. Installation view. Image: Toni Hafkenscheid. [Source]

Online spaces have provided a platform for museums and galleries to continue sharing information and presenting exhibitions when it has been dangerous to gather inside. While expanding access in some senses, digital spaces have limited others, neatly packaging the world into disconnected 2D realities. Perhaps, thinking about land, exterior spaces, and direct community access are worthy open-air alternatives as COVID-19 persists and as we enter into a post-COVID era of curatorial practice.

 

Ebti Nabag, I'm Listening, 2020. Public installation at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, UTSC. [Source]

For more information about Three-Thirty, and to watch the short documentary about the show click here!