Art Metropole

28 Feb. 2018

AM Reader-in-Residence

at Blackwood Gallery

Time

12-1pm

This series of public readings is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Take Care on view at the Blackwood Gallery from September 11, 2017–March 10, 2018.

Adapting the familiar artist’s residency format to one that focuses on practices of reading—reading an exhibition, reading a text, reading as interpretation—Art Metropole’s Reader in Residence will respond to a specific exhibition context and encourage the development of new interpretive possibilities and creative responses to exhibitions and programming.

Please click HERE for directions and accessibility information.

Upcoming Session:

Collective Welfare

Wednesday, February 28, 12pm
Yaniya Lee

In response to Take Care’s fifth and final circuit, Collective Welfare, Yaniya Lee will lead participants through installations in the CCT atrium and e-gallery by Sheena Hoszko and Steven Eastwood. Thinking through the various intimacies of hypervisibility and invisibility, readers will join Lee in a reading and discussion that considers how built environments are connected to well-being, and how we are made vulnerable or empowered by the arrangement of space.

Yaniya Lee is a Toronto-based writer, editor and scholar. Her interdisciplinary research questions critical-reading practices and reconsiders Canadian art histories. Her pursuit of social justice has drawn her to community organizing and collective practice. She is a founding collective member of MICE Magazine and a member of the EMILIA-AMALIA working group. Lee is the 2017-2018 writer-in-residence at Gallery 44 and currently works as associate editor at Canadian Art magazine.

Past Sessions:

Labour of Curation

Wednesday, September 27, 12pm
Josh Vettivelu

Responding to the circuit title, “The Labour of Curation,” artist Josh Vettivelu will lead a round-table reading session on the subjects of Bio Power, the humanization of personal experience and the state’s interference in desire. Reading excerpts from Achile Mbembe’s Necropolitics and Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages, participants will be invited to explore the ways in which power is upheld at a microlevel.

Joshua Vettivelu is an artist working within sculpture, video, performance, and installation. Their work seeks to explore how larger frameworks of power manifest within intimate relationships. Recently, their practice has been examining the tensions that emerge when personal experiences are mined for art production, and how this allows institutions to posture and position themselves as self-reflexive. Vettivelu currently teaches in the Faculty of Continuing Education at OCAD University and is the Director of Programming for Whippersnapper Gallery.

Care Work

Wednesday, October 25, 12pm
Alize Zorlutuna

With an openness to reading that is both literal and metaphorical, Alize Zorlutuna will lead participants through a selection of materials including passages from When Language Runs Dry, a zine for people living with chronic pain and their allies. The session will respond to and interpret the current exhibition, Care Work, in the Blackwood Gallery and the e|gallery, by incorporating a wide definition of “reading” as a practice of care.

Alize Zorlutuna works with installation, video, performance, and material culture. Her work investigates themes concerning identity, queer sexuality, settler-colonial relationships to land, culture and history, intimacy with the non-human, and technology. She received her MFA from Simon Frasier University and currently teaches courses in contemporary sculpture, installation, performance, and hybrid media practices at OCADU in Toronto.

Infrastructures and Aesthetics of Mutual Aid

Wednesday, November 22, 12pm
Lisa Myers

Lisa Myers is an artist, musician, chef and educator with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration.Thinking through both legibility and the various ways in which one reads an image, Myers will invite participants to engage in a project entitled Playing Spoons using a blueprint profile of the Canadian Pacific Railway Mainline and blueberry-stained spoons as graphic notation.

Lisa Myers is an artist, musician, chef and educator with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. Her curatorial practice considers different kinds of value placed on time, sound, and knowledge. In addition to curatorial work based in Toronto, her projects include three touring exhibitions, wnoondwaamin | we hear them (2016); Recast (2014); and the co-curated project Reading the Talk (2014). Her most recent curatorial project Carry Forward runs from September 2017 to January 2018 at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery.Myers has an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial practice from OCAD University. Her writing has been published in many exhibition publications, Senses and Society, Public, C Magazine and FUSE Magazine. Myers is a member of Beausoleil First Nation based in Toronto and Port Severn, Ontario. She is an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University.

Stewardship

Wednesday, January 24, 12pm
Maggie Groat

Take Care’s fourth circuit, Stewardship, decentres the isolated individual as the privileged recipient or the primary site of care. Against the calamitous futures wrought by extractivism and the state forces that enable it, this circuit explores stewardship as a potential counter-modality of caretaking. In direct response to the current exhibition, Groat will read her text “Lake Ontario Almanac”, originally included in the book The Lake, co-published in 2014 by Art Metropole.

Following the reading, Groat invites all participants to share their own curious histories, stories and experiences of Lake Ontario. Each participant will receive a printed copy of Groat’s Lake Ontario Almanac essay from the publication.

The Lake was edited by Maggie Groat, and published as an alternative body of research on Lake Ontario. It included work from James Algie, Gina Badger, Diane Borsato, Joseph Boyden, Jennifer Castle, Sarah Cullen, Dana Fountain, Maggie Groat, April Hickox, Elle Kurancid, Tiziana La Melia, Maryse Lariviere, Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley), Jimmy Limit, Duane Linklater, Tegan Moore, Julie Nagam, Parker Branch, Simon Pope, Sandra Rechico, Ann Sanderson, Simon Starling and cheyanne turions.

Maggie Groat is an artist who works in a variety of media including works on paper, sculpture, textiles, site-specific interventions and publications. Her current research surrounds site-responsiveness with regards to shifting territories, alternative and decolonial ways-of-being, methodologies of collage, and the transformation of salvaged materials into utilitarian objects for speculation, vision and action. Groat studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She has taught at the University of Guelph, the University of Toronto and at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she was the Audain Artist Scholar in Residence in 2014. In 2015 she was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award. Recently, her work has been included in exhibitions at Mercer Union, YYZ Artists’s Outlet, Art Gallery of York University (Toronto), Western Front, SFU Audain Gallery (Vancouver) Rodman Hall Art Centre (St. Catharines) and Walter Philips Gallery (Banff). She is the editor of The Lake (Art Metropole, 2014) and ALMANAC (KWAG, 2017).

Images

1: AM Reader in Residence. Courtesy the artist.
2: k.g. Guttman, I asked the audience to close one eye (performance rehearsal documentation), 2016. Courtesy the artist.

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