PROJECTS
2022
Relays
Relays is an art project between four artists in Canada and four in the United States, involving call-and-response artworks across nations and between participants. In their transformations between borders, the artworks will accretively embody a process of dialogue and translation.
The project starts with each artist submitting a previously existing work responding to ideas of place, exchange, translation, and/or borders, for an online exhibition. The digital exhibition will serve as grounds for the production of newly commissioned works of art. Selecting one each of the showcased online works, an artist in Canada and an artist in the US will each create a responsive artwork.
ARTISTS
Co-Curated by Daniel Atkinson & Sally Frater
Expansive Shorelines: On Falling and Landing in Place
Susan Blight, Moira Hille and Jade Nixon
With Expansive Shorelines: On Falling and Landing in Place we are trying to create a language that articulates the land, shoreline and islands as both a metaphor and methodology of resistance and as a theory of change. Drawing on our own Queer, Indigenous and Black place-making practices, we are visiting not only with each other but also with the land, the skyworld and the water in the Mediterranean Sea. These distinct ways of being and knowing not only shape our work, but also allow us to notice the place-making practices of others who are often thought to be placeless or who are not thought of as place-makers.
Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working with public art, site-specific intervention, photography, film and social practice. Her solo and collaborative work engages questions of personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space.
Moira Hille is an artist, researcher and writer. Moira’s work is inter- and non-disciplinarily and at the intersections of ethics and politics of artistic research. Her work also interweaves artistic practices with theoretical approaches and activist action.
Jade Nixon is a researcher, and writer. Her work is a mix of text and crafting that centers joy and love as a theory of change. Jade is a Phd student at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Jade Nixon’s current proposed research aims to think with Afro-Caribbean women and Afro-Caribbean feminine-of-center people about how they understand their space-and-place making practices aboard the Ubersoca Cruise ship.
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Gordon Hall
Gordon Hall is a sculptor, performance-maker, and writer based in New York.
Hall has presented solo exhibitions at EMPAC (2014), Temple Contemporary (2016), The Renaissance Society (2018), MIT List Visual Arts Center (2018), and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2019). Hall’s sculptures and performances have been exhibited in a variety of group settings including Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2010), SculptureCenter (2012), Movement Research (2012), Brooklyn Museum (2014), White Columns (2015), Whitney Museum of American Art (2015), Hessel Museum at Bard College (2015), Art in General (2016), Wysing Arts Centre (2017), Abrons Arts Center (2017), Socrates Sculpture Park (2017), The Drawing Center (2018), David Zwirner New York (2018), Verge Center for the Arts (2019), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (2021), and AIR Gallery (2021).
Hall’s books include Reading Things—Gordon Hall on Gender, Sculpture, and Relearning How To See (Walker Art Center, 2016), AND PER SE AND (Art in General, 2016), Details (Walls Divide Press, 2017), The Number of Inches Between Them (MIT 2019), OVER-BELIEFS, Gordon Hall Collected Writing 2011-2018 (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art/Container Corps, 2019), Other People’s Houses (AIR Gallery, 2021), and Circling the Square: Words from END OF DAY (Hesse Flatow, 2021).
Since 2011 Hall has directed their artist project the Center for Experimental Lectures which has organized lecture-performance programs at MoMA PS1(2012), Recess (2013, 2014), The Shandaken Project at Storm King Art Center (yearly, 2012 -2016), Interstate Projects (2017), Brooklyn Academy of Music (2017), Artists Space (2020), RISD Museum (2020), Haus Wien, Vienna (2021) and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, producing a series of lectures and seminars in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Hall’s work has been covered in Artforum, Artsy, Art in America, V Magazine, Randy, Bomb, Flash Art, Title Magazine, Interior Design Magazine, and Mousse Magazine, and they have published essays in Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge, 2012), Art Journal (2013), What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (SculptureCenter/Black Dog Press, 2015), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2016), and Art in America (2018), among many other contexts.
Hall has been awarded residencies and grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Triangle Arts Association, The Jerome Foundation, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ACRE, Fire Island Artist Residency, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Hall has lectured widely at colleges, universities, and residencies, including: Boston University, The Städelschule in Frankfurt, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design, School of Visual Arts, University of Maine at Orono, The University of California Berkeley, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, University of South Florida, Oxbow School of Art, Denison University, Hampshire College, Michigan State University, Yale University, California College of the Arts, UCLA, Columbia University, The Swiss Institute, The Charlotte Foundation in Kansas City, and The Piet Zwart Institute, and The Royal Academy at the Hague. Hall has taught at Parsons the New School for Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Virginia Commonwealth University, was a 2019-2020 Provost Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design, and is resident faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2022. Gordon Hall is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Vassar College.
Hall holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Hampshire College.
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Pablo Helguera
Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction.
His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of artworks regarded under the area of socially engaged art.
Pablo Helguera performed individually at the Museum of Modern Art /Gramercy Theater, in 2003, where he showed his work “Parallel Lives”. His musical composition, “Endingness” has been performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; ICA Boston; RCA London; 8th Havana Biennal, PERFORMA 05, Havana; Manifesta, Zurich, MoMA P.S.1, New York; Brooklyn Museum; IFA Galerie, Bonn; MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City, The Bronx Museum, Artist Space, and Sculpture Center, amongst many others. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, The New York Times, ArtNews, amongst others. In 2008 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. In 2011 he was named winner of the International Award of Participatory Art of the Region Emilia-Romagna in Italy. He has also received the Franklin Furnace and Art Matters grants.
Helguera has worked since 1991 in a variety of contemporary art museums, most recently as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005). From 2007 to 2020, he was Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized close to 1000 public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which took place in September, 2011. He is currently Assistant Professor of Arts and Entrepreneurship at the College of Performing Arts at the New School in New York. He is the author of many books, including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and The Parable Conference (2014).
He writes a weekly column titled Beautiful Eccentrics.
Unmapping
Maria Hupfield
A textile based work that signals renewed and expanded exploration with colour. Backed by my signature grey industrial felt the vibrant swatches of colour sewn in a crazy quilt style assemblage design simultaneously acknowledges both new and traditional systems of understanding by resisting the conformity of the grid in the present. This approach further complements my established body of work with themes that connect to function, body knowledge, performance art,and “Place-ful” relationships to land.
Maria Hupfield (she/her) is a Toronto based artist and transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture. She is currently the inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residency with the City of Toronto, Ravines; and a primary thought partner in the “Praxis of Indigenous Knowledge and Collective Mentorship” as a 2023 Mellon Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (CIB) at Arizona State University (ASU). which follows her inaugural Borderlands Fellowship for the project Breaking Protocol at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School and the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University (2020-2022). A recipient of the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada (2018) she has exhibited and performed her work through the touring solo exhibition The One Who Keeps On Giving (organized by The Power Plant 2017-2018), and solo Nine Years Towards the Sun, at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2019-2020.
She has exhibited extensively including recent purchases at: Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and show cased projects in New York at CARA (Center for Art Research and Alliance), Abrons Art Center, the New York Museum of Art and Design, BRIC House Gallery, the Bronx Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian; amongst others. An Assistant Professor and Canadian Research Chair, Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto, Hupfield is Martin clan and off-rez member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. Maria Hupfield is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband artist Jason Lujan.
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Rebekka Parker
A textile based work that signals renewed and expanded exploration with colour. Backed by my signature grey industrial felt the vibrant swatches of colour sewn in a crazy quilt style assemblage design simultaneously acknowledges both new and traditional systems of understanding by resisting the conformity of the grid in the present. This approach further complements my established body of work with themes that connect to function, body knowledge, performance art,and “Place-ful” relationships to land.
Rebekka Parker is a Detroit-based artist, museum educator, and writer. Over the course of her fifteen-year career, she has held several positions at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the curatorial, programming, and education departments and at Cranbrook Art Museum in the curatorial department. Her writing has been published in exhibition catalogs and an edited volume on the future of museum practice. She earned a dual B.A. in Art History – Museum Studies and Anthropology from the University of Michigan (2009), an M.S.Ed. in Leadership in Museum Education from Bank Street College of Education (2018), and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2021).
She has exhibited extensively including recent purchases at: Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and show cased projects in New York at CARA (Center for Art Research and Alliance), Abrons Art Center, the New York Museum of Art and Design, BRIC House Gallery, the Bronx Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian; amongst others. An Assistant Professor and Canadian Research Chair, Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto, Hupfield is Martin clan and off-rez member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. Maria Hupfield is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband artist Jason Lujan.
Untitled, Hog Island aka Paradise Island, New Providence, Bahamas
Kara Springer
This photograph was taken on the land formerly known as Hog Island, an island spanning one square mile located just off the shore of Nassau in The Bahamas. Originally named for the wild hogs who inhabited it and now most famously known for the mega resort Atlantis, Hog Island was purchased in 1959 by the wealthy white American heir of A&P Supermarket. He renamed it Paradise Island and built its first resort, paving the way for the expansive touristic development that dominates the island today.
Rebekka Parker is a Detroit-based artist, museum educator, and writer. Over the course of her fifteen-year career, she has held several positions at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the curatorial, programming, and education departments and at Cranbrook Art Museum in the curatorial department. Her writing has been published in exhibition catalogs and an edited volume on the future of museum practice. She earned a dual B.A. in Art History – Museum Studies and Anthropology from the University of Michigan (2009), an M.S.Ed. in Leadership in Museum Education from Bank Street College of Education (2018), and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2021).
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Kelly Uyeda
In my paintings, domestic motifs chart hospitable space, patterning a sense of home onto the world. From my sister’s living room window, these two exclamation points on a pair of church doors punctuate the sleepy street. They add levity and severity; they express excitement and surprise. As I stare at them, they morph into bunny ears, then, again, into a pair of elongated old-timey cartoon eyeballs. Such simple forms are capable of shapeshifting to both fit and break our many frames of reference, opening themselves up to make room for us.
Kelly Uyeda uses decorative pattern to study how the habits and pleasures of looking animate our surroundings. Identifying recurrent shapes in her domestic realm as both footholds and springboards, Uyeda recognizes their repetition as part of the visual structuring of her life.
José Villalobos
In my paintings, domestic motifs chart hospitable space, patterning a sense of home onto the world. From my sister’s living room window, these two exclamation points on a pair of church doors punctuate the sleepy street. They add levity and severity; they express excitement and surprise. As I stare at them, they morph into bunny ears, then, again, into a pair of elongated old-timey cartoon eyeballs. Such simple forms are capable of shapeshifting to both fit and break our many frames of reference, opening themselves up to make room for us.
José Villalobos grew up on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, TX, and was raised in a traditional and religiously (Evangelical) conservative family. His work reconciles the identity challenges in his life, caught in between traditional Mexican customs and American mores, as well as growing up with religious ideals that conflict and condemn being gay. Villalobos confronts the derogatory terms and attitudes that he continues to withstand today. The root of Villalobos’s work lies in the performativity of his identity. His accouterments are proud connections to his heritage but are also reminders of the hate and homophobia that he has had to endure. Villalobos manipulates material through the context of self-identity as he examines gender roles within family culture. He demonstrates that dismantling traditional modes of masculine identity centers an interstitial space where materiality softens virility. Villalobos protests the toxicity of machismo using objects, specifically within the norteño culture, that carry a history by deconstructing and altering them. Although new forms are created, he demonstrates the battle between the acceptance of being a maricón and assimilating to the cultural expectations.
Villalobos received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Villalobos is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant Award and Residency and is also a recipient of the Tanne Foundation Award. His work has been nationally and internationally recognized such as the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; NARS Foundation, New York, NY; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ ; El Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and upcoming at the Denver Art Museum and Casa de Cultura, Zacatecas MX.
José Villalobos’s work is included in the collection of Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, Mexic-arte Museum, Austin, TX, the City of San Antonio Public Collection, TX, Albright College, Reading, PA, and Soho House International in Austin, TX.
CO-Curators
Daniel Atkinson is an educator, public programmer, and publisher. Originally from Minnesota, he is of mixed European settler and Mexican heritage. Atkinson is currently the Manager of Learning, Adult Interpretive Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Atkinson has held positions at several art institutions throughout the US, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and at Dia:Beacon, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of the Moving Image across New York. He has degrees in Studio Arts (BA, U. of Minnesota), Art Education (MA, NYU), and Leadership in Museum Education (MS, Bank Street, NY).
Sally Frater holds an Honours BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and an MA with merit in Contemporary Art from The University of Manchester/Sotheby’s Institute of Art. The daughter of immigrants from the Caribbean, curatorially she is interested in decolonization, space and place, Black and Caribbean diasporas, photography, art of the everyday, and issues of equity and representation in museological spaces. She has curated and co-curated solo and group exhibitions for institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, the Ulrich Museum of Art, the McColl Center for Art and Innovation, Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, Project Row Houses, and Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice. A former resident in the Core Critical Studies fellowship at the Glassell School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Frater has also completed fellowships and residencies at the UT Dallas Centraltrak, Southern Methodist University, Project Row Houses, and Art21. The recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts she is a member of the Association of Art Museum Curators and is an alumna of Independent Curators International. Currently, Frater is the curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Guelph.
THIS PROJECT IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY