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Xpace Cultural Centre is a not-for-profit artist-run centre supported by the OCAD Student Union. We are dedicated to providing emerging and student artists, designers, curators and art writers with opportunities to showcase their work in a professional setting.
We approach our programming as a form of world-building: providing exhibitions, events, panels and workshops. Expanding notions of theory and aesthetics, we seek to hold space for thought-provoking and experimental collaborations and work on short timelines, which allow us to respond directly to what is going on in our communities.
Xpace Cultural Centre is committed to maintaining an anti-oppressive, queer positive environment, prioritizing marginalized, Black, Indigenous and People of Colour.
We wish to acknowledge this sacred land on which Xpace Cultural Centre operates. It has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. The territories include the Huron-Wendat, Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations, and the Métis Nation. The territory is the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. Today, the meeting place of Tkaronto is home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this territory.
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Director
Avalon Mott (she/her) is a curator, arts administrator and lens based artist originally from Vancouver BC, now calling Toronto home. She graduated with her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and is pursuing her MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCADU as the recipient of the Presidential Scholarship and Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
Avalon was a founding member and the co-director of FIELD Contemporary, and has curated for numerous BC institutions. She has also curated public art installations for the City of Richmond, the City of Vancouver, and Capture Photography Festival among others.
Avalon’s curatorial practice is rooted in supporting emerging and under-represented artists, alongside a commitment to bringing accessibility into the gallery space. Her thesis research is rooted in process and studio culture, and how this long standing tradition when brought into the gallery can aid in fostering accessibility and provide the viewer with a sense of agency and a platform for learning.
Programming Coordinator
Philip Leonard Ocampo (b.1995) is an artist and arts facilitator based in Tkaronto, Canada. Ocampo’s multidisciplinary practice involves painting, sculpture, writing and curatorial projects. Exploring worldbuilding, radical hope and speculative futures, Ocampo’s work embodies a curious cross between magic wonder and the nostalgic imaginary. Following the tangents, histories and canons of popular culture, Ocampo is interested in how unearthing cultural zeitgeists of past / current times may therefore serve as catalysts for broader conversations about lived experiences; personal, collective, diasporic, etc.
He holds a BFA in Integrated Media (DPXA) from OCAD University (2018) and is currently a Programming Coordinator at Xpace Cultural Centre and one of the four founding co-directors of Hearth, an artist-run collective based in the city.
Programming Coordinator
Natalie King (she/her) is a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe (Algonquin) artist, facilitator and member of Timiskaming First Nation. King’s arts practice ranges from video, painting, sculpture and installation as well as community engagement, curation and arts administration.
Often involving portrayals of queer femmes, King’s works are about embracing the ambiguity and multiplicities of identity within the Anishinaabe queer femme experience(s). King’s practice operates from a firmly critical, anti-colonial, non-oppressive, and future-bound perspective, reclaiming the realities of lived liv es through frameworks of desire and survivance.
King’s recent exhibitions include Come and Get Your Love at Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto (2022), Proud Joy at Nuit Blanche Toronto (2022), Bursting with Love at Harbourfront Centre (2021) PAGEANT curated by Ryan Rice at Centre[3] in Hamilton (2021), and (Re)membering and (Re)imagining: the Joyous Star Peoples of Turtle Island at Hearth Garage (2021). King has extensive mural making practice that includes a permanent mural currently on at the Art Gallery of Burlington. King holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University (2018). King is currently GalleryTPW’s 2023 Curatorial Research Fellow.
King has a BFA from OCAD University and currently lives and makes on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations, and the Métis Nation in Tkaronto, Turtle Island
Communications Assistant
Agnes Wong (she/her) is a multidisciplinary designer and artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Hong Kong.
Through an experimental approach, Agnes’ creative practice seeks to integrate themes of displacement, fragmentation, and temporality together in an interdisciplinary blend of digital and moving image, photography, graphic design, text, and print matter. She holds a BFA (Honours with Distinction) in Publications from OCAD University (2023) and has completed her propaedeutic studies at Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands.
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