The Blog
Xpace – COVID-19 Update
Dear Xpace community,
Xpace will remain closed for the month of May 2020. We’re putting all our energy into rescheduling postponed exhibitions and shifting programming around to adapt to the current circumstances – both virtually and IRL.
It’s a slow process. Much slower than we are used to working through as a small artist-run centre and it has definitely been a great challenge. The pandemic has taken a toll on so many of us: emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually.
It comes as no surprise that our current social and political systems, upheld by white supremacy and capitalism, are not sustainable.
It comes as no surprise that prioritizing profit and “productivity” over communal care is a colonial illusion.
It comes as no surprise that the precarious realities of so many are ignored, that state support is inherently discriminative and biased.
As much as we’d love for it to be the case, we’re not “all in it together”. Not yet.
A deep bow to land defenders, to essential workers, to folx dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy and fighting for equity and accessibility, on the frontlines, from their homes, in their every day.
Profound gratitude for the elders that guide us, and the youth that keep the spark going.
Thank you for your patience and for accompanying us through this moment. It’s inspiring to see so many virtual calls to action, teach-ins and messages of collective care and resilience. We see the incredible amount of energy you’re putting into nurturing yourself, and those around you.
As adrienne maree brown reminds us, we are learning to move at the speed of trust. It’s a challenge for everyone, but we’re grateful to be learning by your side.
*virtual hug*
And now some updates!
We’re excited to be launching the open call for our annual OCAD U Graduate Residency, set to take place in August 2020. Stay tuned for more information in these upcoming weeks!
Stay tuned on social media as we dig into our exhibition archives to bring you some cool Weekly Staff Picks, gathered by past and current staff members – dating all the way back to 2004 – that have helped make Xpace who we are today.
And lastly… this Friday is our programming assistant Enna Kim’s last day with Xpace. Enna started with us last summer, when she created the badass design for our most recent VOLUME publication, available to read online here. She’s been such an immense pleasure to work with, always showing up with a big smile, big ideas and the best style. Thank you Enna for all of your time, dedication and energy and a huge congratulations for graduating this year! We’re going to miss you a lot <3 Be sure to check out her website to follow her creative ventures.
Deep gratitude to all of you. Stay tuned, and stay safe!
Alexia, Philip and Natalie
Xpace COVID-19 Update
Dear friends of Xpace,
A couple of updates on our end, as we continue to follow the guidance of Canadian public health authorities to protect the health and safety of our staff and community:
Xpace Cultural Centre will remain closed until Tuesday, April 28th and all onsite exhibitions and events have been put on hold.
COVID-19 Artist Resources
There are multiple grassroots and state-led emergency funds, resources, toolkits and volunteer services being shared citywide for artists, freelancers and folx most affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. You can visit our public Facebook group and check our Instagram stories for daily updates, and feel free to send over any initiatives you’d like us to share with our networks!
Web Programming
As we continue to brainstorm creative ways of supporting and engaging with you remotely.
Please join us on Friday, April 3rd @ 1 PM for a virtual tour of Memorial: Artists of the Venezuelan Diaspora led by artist José Andrés Mora.
Additionally, you can tune into a free Tenant’s Rights Webinar facilitated by Piera Savage, co-presented by Images Festival!
In the meanwhile, you can always browse the public External Space archives on our website, which carries a generous collection of video, animation and media-based works by emerging artists that have exhibited with us in the past 9 years.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to Alexia with any ideas, suggestions or requests at [email protected].
We will keep you updated on any changes as they roll in.
Sending much love, stay safe and cozy!
Alexia, Natalie, Philip and Enna
Xpace COVID-19 Response
Dear friends of Xpace,
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, we are actively following the guidance of Canadian public health authorities to protect the health and safety of our staff and community.
Following recommendations from the Department of Health Canada, spring programming at Xpace Cultural Centre has been postponed until further notice.
Xpace will remain closed and scheduled events/exhibitions will be put on hold. To practice social distancing, our staff members are working remotely and maintaining communication through email, cellphone, Skype and social media.
We understand that it may be a scary and stressful time for many of you right now, especially for those in precarious health, work or living situations. Please be assured that all scheduled artists, curators, speakers and facilitators will be paid on time and in accordance to CARFAC fees, regardless of any cancellations.
We are also posting daily updates on our public Facebook group and Instagram regarding resources, toolkits and emergency funds for artists, freelancers and folx most affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. Please join the discussion, invite friends and send over anything you’d like us to share with our networks.
Although we’re a small team, we recognize the role that Xpace plays in the emerging arts community, and are doing everything in our capacity to practice mindful social distancing, keep everyone informed and support you as best we can.
We are currently brainstorming creative ways in which we can present programming, host gatherings and share resources virtually and online. If you have any ideas, suggestions or accommodation requests, please contact Alexia at [email protected].
We will keep you updated on any changes as they roll in.
Sending much love, stay safe!
Alexia, Natalie, Philip and Enna
Travel journal: New York City, 2019
In September of this year I was able to travel to New York city with some generous support from the gallery. Under less than ideal circumstances (in relation to life events, purpose, funds and other commitments) my only other experiences with this place have been either too short or unfulfilled. There’s a difference between looking and seeing! So with an iphone 6 in hand and enough underwear to last me a week, I step off a Megabus an onto a busy New York City sidewalk, eager to learn more and do some research about arts / artist run culture in the city.
This post is largely an assortment of miscellaneous things: Observations, art, sights seen, and things i’ve learned. I’m excited to share it with you!
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e-flux journal on feminism(s): Double issue launch with Martha Rosler, Xin Wang, McKenzie Wark, and Elvia Wilk. Among all the mini lectures given, Xin Wang’s was my favorite – It was about how Boys’ Love and slash fiction (using sports as an example), a literary genre written primarily for women by women, and its curiosity and interest in empathetically exploring the other, can be
liberating, feminist act.
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- Guerrilla Girls at the Brooklyn Museum.
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- Fred Wilson, Grey Area (Brown Version) at the Brooklyn Museum
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- Printed Matter!!! Pics of some sweet zines I scooped up for our zine library up next ~
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- Proposals for Printed Matter, Inc., 2014. Wanted to pick up something published in-house.
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Haejin Park, Paige Mehrer, Sophie Page, It’s True
(´｡✪ω✪｡｀)
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- “Who Will Police the Police?” On the murder of Walter Scott.
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- Misaki Kawai I love
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- Here they are in our Zine Library, living it up
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- Favorite work from JIM JOE, WHAT DOES IT MEAN AND HOW DID YOU CHOOSE IT at the Hole.
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- Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Until Different
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Marguerite Humeau, Birth Canal at the New Museum!
There was a really strong scent component to this exhibition that i’m to this day still trying to define.
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- Say Something Bunny by Alison S. M. Kobayashi (I was David)
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- I was David
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- Trisha Baga, Mollusca & The Pelvic Floor at Greene Naftali.
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- Amazon Alexa, this week your performance in the mini challenge was Siri-ously sick’ning, and on the runway you left us gagging to our Google Homes. Condragulations, you are the winner of this Amazon Alexa holder shaped like a bust of RuPaul.
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- Trisha Baga’s dog is iconic
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- Clarissa Tossin, xojowisaj ja (to make the building dance), 2017 for Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at Whitney Museum of American Art
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- Ronny Quevedo, The Main Event (Nomadic Structures), 2016. for Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at Whitney Museum of American Art
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- Monica Flaherty, Petroglyph studies forfor Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at Whitney Museum of American Art
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- New York Art Book Fair super fun but also super crowded!
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- Miscellaneous sculptures from the MET (I forgot to jot down what specifically these were)
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- It’s a Dragonfly!!!
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- Wish I took more pictures of some of the amazing garments featured in Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination at the MET.
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- I loved how seamlessly the exhibition was integrated into their existing European collection.
Toronto vs. NYC is so wildly different – Despite this being my longest trip, I know that I haven’t even scratched the surface of what the city has to over. It’s is just so big!
Until next time I guess. Thanks for reading ;^)
-Philip
Gardening with Native Plants
During For Us, By Us‘ opening night, there was a “Seed Swap” and everyone was welcomed to go home with a variety of native flower and vegetable seeds. We have grOCAD and professor Sayeh Dastgheib-Beheshti to thank for their generous contributions. In conversation with the exchange that occurred on the reception evening, I thought that it would be relevant to share an educational document provided by the Toronto Green Community. This PDF is a handout from a past workshop in which you will find a myriad of information, from site assessment to seed starting a variety of native plants.
Here are some benefits of gardening with native plants:
- They are adapted and have evolved to suit the regional climate, soils and wildlife
- They are more resistant to local pests, diseases and harsh weather (require no pesticide)
- They need minimal watering
- They provide shelter and food for local wildlife (who in turn provide fertilizer enriching the soil)
- They help in the proliferations of pollinators like bees
Image from:https://www.torontogardens.com/2015/02/evergreen-canada-native-plant-database.html/
For Us, By Us Database Launch
I am very excited by this first blog post featuring a bountiful basket of goodies. This image picturing Oprah presenting such abundance from the land, is gold to me. I feel very drawn to it, especially as a Black woman who is passionate about gardening. Not only does it visually defeat a spectrum of images in which Black people are shown as dispossessed, but it also highlights an achievable condition- food security and sovereignty for all. While Oprah has many privileges, among them a boundless access to food, to me this picture is a seed of hope for an alternative future of self and communal dietary sufficiency. I believe that it is a fantastic image to kick-off this blog segment accompanying For Us, By Us, a group exhibition featuring works by: Andre Baynes, Lwrds Duniam & Aemilus Milo, Dana Prieto with Chandra Maracle, Rowan Red Sky, and Sheila Sampath. I wish that the forthcoming articles and links will allow for a deeper engagement with the themes of the exhibition, and encourage you to ruminate, reflect, consider, or re-consider the ways in which food holds an important place in moving towards a decolonial future.
-Geneviève Wallen, curator
The Art of Slowness
It is mid-August and the skies are oily with smog. A handful of galleries have pressed pause on their exhibition cycle, the city streets half-buzz, half-empty as vacationers exit the city for reprieve. If we want to talk about seasonal slowness, August is the month when structures loosen and demands slacken. So, perhaps it comes as no surprise that in the sluggish heat of August, where we are forced to slow our bodies to accommodate the environment that I, too, am thinking about slowness in the context of art writing and practice. I’m interested in the ways that slowness is thought of, implied, and practiced in processes of art making and viewership.
Using the Slow Movement as my starting point for thinking about slowness and its many intersections, we can see that slowness works to dismantle normative ideas of production and consumption and exchanges measured and quantitative temporality with affective, qualitative experience. As slowness becomes suffixed to many sectors threatened by corporatization and capitalist acceleration, it may too be a method of critique and embodied thinking in art practice and writing to articulate spaces of ambiguity and poetics and make way for looser structures of thinking and making.
However, the relation between art and slowness is more intimate than a coupled term: art is fundamentally slow. It both embodies and invites slowness, distancing itself from the accelerated flows of production, distribution, and consumption and inviting interaction without aim or definitive result. Art is an anachronistic, slow object that stages itself against time and instead opens itself to multiple temporalities. Art objects are not static representations but objects open to activation by subjective, cultural, and historical interpretation. These next instalments of writing, produced during my stay at Xpace Culture Centre through the Writer-in-Residency program, expand on art’s slowness and the art of slowness to consider temporality and movement in art writing and practice.
-Sara England
Travel journal: Austin and Dallas, TX
Xpace Director Emily Gove recently travelled to Texas and visited the Blanton Art Museum, The Contemporary Austin, the Webb Gallery and Nasher Sculpture Center while exploring Austin, Dallas and Waxahachie. Check out her photos below.
Gran Fury, Riot in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s at the Blanton Art Museum in Austin, TX
Donald Moffett, Call the White House in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Felix Gonzalez Torres (left) and Gran Fury (right) in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Beverly Semmes, Famous Twins in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Alex Bag, Untitled Fall ’95 in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Nikki S. Lee, Projects in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Mariko Mori, Pratibimba #3 in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s
Lise Haller Baggeson, Mothernism at The Contemporary Austin at Laguna Gloria
Tom Sachs, Miffy Fountain, in the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria
Paul McCarthy, White Snow #3, in the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria
Mark Mothersbaugh, Myopia at the Contemporary Austin
Daniel Johnston, Jeremiah the Innocent
Esther Pearl Watson, Running from the Police in Camaraderie at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, TX
Inside Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow at Nasher Sculpture Center
Doris Salcedo, Plegaria Muda at Nasher Sculpture Center
Mai-Thu Perret, Sightings at Nasher Sculpture Center
Anish Kapoor, Sky Mirror at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, TX. Read more about the Dallas Cowboys art collection here.
Travel journal: Detroit, Akron, Cleveland and Alliance
Our Director, Emily Gove, visited Detroit, Cleveland, Akron and Alliance this weekend – check out her photos below from MOCAD, Cranbrook Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, the Troll Hole Art Emporium, the Feline Historical Museum, MOCA Cleveland, Transformer Station and the Cleveland Institute of Art:
Dave Eggers Prints and Drawings in the Mobile Homestead at MOCA Detroit
Ragnar Kjartansson, Woman in E at MOCA Detroit
Steve Shaw, Gratiot Ave. in Detroit Affinities curated by Jens Hoffman at MOCA Detroit
assume vivid astro focus in Read Image, See Text at Cranbrook Art Museum
Him, a project by Liz Cohen at Cranbrook Art Museum
Sol Lewitt, Wall Drawings 790A and 790B: Irregular Alternating Color Bands at Cranbrook Art Museum
The Troll Hole Art Emporium, home of the world’s largest troll collection
Entrance to the Feline History Museum at the Cat Fanciers Association of America
Original painting by Louis Wain at the Feline Historical Museum
Natalie Lanese, Depthless Without You in Neo Geo at Akron Art Museum
Amy Sinbondit, Singularity in Neo Geo at Akron Art Museum
An installation of digital enlargements of vernacular Kodacolor snapshots printed on fabric by Laura Ruth Bidwell in Unfixed: the fugitive image at Transformer Station
Valérie Blass, Je suis une image in Stranger at MOCA Cleveland, curated by Rose Bouthillier
Sascha Braunig in Stranger
Christine Meder, Sorry in the Open Student Exhibition at Cleveland Institute of Art
Dupont Street Art District
Nude in the Woods, Jessica Groome, Erin Stump Projects.
With many of Toronto’s beloved galleries making the move to Dupont St., I decided to take a walk in the new gallery hub on a shockingly warm November day. With such a high population of contemporary galleries within a couple block radius, there is a real sense of a growing community.
Though at first the street felt slightly quiet and desolate, the moment I exited the underpass just west of Lansdowne and Dupont- the mood quickly changed.
Immediately I felt I was in a new part of the city, one that was clearly in the midst of developing into a unique and creative community.
