SELECT CURATORIAL WORK
2023
stitching in your shape
RIVERDALE GALLERY, TORONTO
Zainab Hussain, Par Nair, Lan "Florence" Yee, Lauren D'Ambrosio
Co-curated with Paulina Padilla, assistance from Ignazio Nicastro
Supported by Toronto Arts Council
stitching in your shape examines the work of labour, language and textiles in expressing the collective grief of homesickness and disconnection.
Tying familial relations through the common threads of textiles and embroidery, stitching in your shape gives audiences space to sit with lived experiences of tenuous, disembodied connection. Using labour in textile work as a practice of commemoration, meditation, and complicated catharsis, stitching in your shape incorporates practices and materials from everyday life to monumentalize a longing for connection.
Photo documentation by Felicia Byron
2021
QUEERSPHERE
InterAccess, TORONTO
Online Exhibition
Marissa Sean Cruz, Whess Harman, Keiko Hart, Max Lander, Lucas LaRochelle
Co-Curated with Sean Sandusky
QUEERSPHERE makes space for Queer and Trans dreamographies in a time of accelerated closures and isolation. Modelling itself after the social media platforms of the early 2000s, this virtual group exhibition envisions an “if only” site where 2SLGBTQIA+ imaginations, social groups, and world-building are allowed to flourish outside of the pressures of corporatization and flat representation.
2020
Dying.
DesignTO Festival
ARTSCAPE YOUNGPLACE
TORONTO
Brileigh Hardcastle, Clara Laratta, David Constantino Salazar, Elyse-Krista Mische, Fiona Annis, Karen Oikonen, Kate Hale Wilkes, Kate Sellen, Kathy Porter, Laura Kay Keeling, Lydia Haywood-Munn, Max Suillerot, Mia Cinelli and Sarina Isenberg.
Co-Curated with Michelle Barclay
THE WISDOM OF RUINS
CRITICAL DISTANCE FOR CURATORS
TORONTO
HollyJo
Co-curated with Michelle Barclay
2019
Messmates
ADA SLAIGHT GALLERY
TORONTO
In Conjunction with the UNIFOR National Chair in Social Justice and Democracy
A collaboration between OCAD University and Toronto Metropolitan University
Beehive Collective, Annie Chen, Athena Katerina, Bethea Ramos, Brandon Prince, Carolina Uscategui Moncaleano, Chelsea Smith, Ghazal Vakilzadeh, Gina D'Aloisio, Jason Zante, Huaijun Wen, Patrick Stochmal, Sandra Dammizio, Skylar Cheung, Tamar Bresge, Zishuo Li, Sean Sandusky, Alanis Obamsawin.
Co-curated with Michelle Barclay
Messmates is a submission-based group exhibition focusing on the many intersections of climate justice. The show serves as an entry point to thinking about how we engage with the land and her resources. How do we make room for a relationship with the land rather than ownership of her? How do we navigate our own complicity in colonial and capitalist environmental destruction? What does it mean to push through collective grief for the land and strategize? Messmates is not an end point, but a call to action – we want to ask each other to do more: to advocate for changes in policy; to use our bodies and our art to protest; to listen and learn from one another; and to value collaboration, interconnection and care.
Gucci Could Never
XPACE CULTURAL CENTRE, TORONTO
Alexi Pedneault, Lenox Daley, Maximilian Suillerot, Binary Rainbow, Sean Sandusky.
Gucci could Never is a group exhibition that plays with humour, text, theatricality and general camp aesthetics. These tools are used as a means to assert agency and community through the codified expression of queer identity. It is a celebration and undertaking of the power of camp sensibility that gently twists ideas of what class and gender identity can look like. Gucci could Never struts into the limelight of dominant culture and seeks to make space for an inclusive, democratic and queer AF representation.
Photo credit: Polina Teif
I Was Still There
OCAD U, TORONTO
Marjorie Beaucage, Deanna Bowen, Lisa Steele.
I was still there is a presentation of video works exhibiting methods of framing grief in order to see oneself as an agent in one's own healing. Presented as BFA Thesis at OCAD University.
Photo credit: Michelle Beck
What boundaries constitute life and death? By what customs do we memorialize, celebrate and grieve our loved ones? How do we tether ourselves to the living and the dead? How does traumatic death complicate our understanding of life before and after? How do we navigate our own fears surrounding death and empower our wishes for end-of-life care? This exhibition hopes to provide context for these questions through the lens of art and design; opening a community platform for meaningful conversations around death and dying which extend beyond the gallery space to enact social change.
Exhibition Documentation by Michelle Beck
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Featuring the work of emerging Toronto-based artist HollyJo, The Wisdom of Ruins is a collection of materials that bear witness to unconventional grief and rituals of mourning.
Meditating between her mother's birthplace—a medieval Sicilian city decimated by a 1968 earthquake—and the death of her daughter, HollyJo’s works were conceived in response to the communal honouring of ruins. Existing outside of Western funerary customs, The Wisdom of Ruins offers a holistic methodology through which to begin a process of bereavement and healing. Grieving motherhood, childhood, and inherited trauma, the works help interpret the private space between repression and radical acknowledgement.
Photo credit: Michelle Beck