Opening January 27- April 15, 2026
MUSEUM IN WATER (ICED)
113Research
OCADU
100 McCaul St. Toronto, 5th Floor
Curators: Pam Patterson and Grace MacDonald
(three single edition archival photographs on canvas with found threads positioned in Main Gallery Vitrines and two vinyl works on Annex Gallery walls)
Iced is an exhibition of three large-scale single edition photographic works imbued with found threads. The project builds on the double body idea I’ve been pursuing for five years in my research-creation project called MUSEUM IN WATER. It connects museum and civic spaces personal to me as central watering holes. Contextualized amongst winter depictions of the reflecting pool at Mel Lastman Square and our current Toronto winter, one could also say all are also frozen in time by the camera. Materially speaking, hundreds of threads root the photographs to the ground/underground, and hang free-style down the image surface. Like electricity or “image energy” the threads shift ever slightly toward the viewer challenging the image’s illusion, breaking its fourth wall and responding to our corporeal selves. They spill out to touch and feel. Conceptually, the compositions echo a surface tension and resistance to a single moment captured in time, and function collectively as a narrative: a metaphor for collaborative making through and in spite of seismic ontological breaks, broken bodies and spirits.
Curator Pam Patterson invited me to respond to the theme of Transformational Ontologies. Patterson writes, “the validity of that which is central to our existence is being questioned.” She asks, “How are we experiencing these insidious, often unwanted, disruptions that hit at the core of our very being? How might we capture, recover, and transform this moment?” I engaged with this idea by inserting the museum as my subject: a place filled with complexities. 113Research Project Space sits across from the Art Gallery of Ontario where I worked for twelve years. Both the university and the museum are vascular sites for our capacity to learn and engage across difference. As symbols of futurity, the people who lounge in these spaces and in my photos evoke a palpable double-edged restlessness and fatigue. I want to see how a future that might embody boredom and embrace slow time can change the concurrent propensity to build bigger and broader. Coupled with images of Walker Court are a monochromatic depiction of Mel Lastman Square’s reflecting pool that stands in as my obsidian mirror; and in a second body of work, are two collages of militarized babies carrying iconic museums on their backs. These museums have entered my orbit for my research-creation project. With tongue-in-cheek, inner and outer spaces collide willfully, as the very real science fiction of inter-planetary colonization contributes to the narrative of my story through my artist/museum worker lens.
.jpeg)
Iced runs concurrently with Skated on Ice and Stone, an exhibition of seven additional single edition large-scale photographic works at Gladstone House (January 16-April 28). The exhibitions comprise a seasonal narrative in the MUSEUM IN WATER project that expands on my research question, “What is a transformational museum experience?”
About Paola Poletto
I am a multidisciplinary artist-curator born in Italy and based in Toronto on land that is Michi Sagging Nishnawbe territory. My work is rooted in social practice and site-specificity, experiential design, and a methodology inspired by feminist, queer and indigenous relational aesthetics. I have over 25 years of exhibition experience. I am focused on long-form durational research and presentation with emphasis on engagement and process. I have co- edited/curated/organized visual and literary reflections with projects taking place internationally and locally. My career as an artist and museum worker situates my current work as an autotheory (a theory that one develops out of a personal experience and art practice. It is an approach described by Lauren Fournier in their book, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism). My project looks at what it means and feels like to be an artist/art worker in a museum today.
Since 2021, I have paired two main sites — Toronto’s civic reflecting pool at Mel Lastman Square, and the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Walker Court — to develop a long-form first-person response to an ontological question about creativity in the museum. I have been walking to compose my photographs in both locations, experimenting with a multi-perspective form of looking and a means to both decentralize my gaze, the power structures within which I move, whether art world broadly speaking, or other, and to also "destabilize" the viewer's gaze in a meaningful way. The glitches, black surfaces of digital non-computes, become places "of opportunity," and the blurry bits are sites of "movement and change.” The strings that puncture through the photograph’s surface with needle and thread are “image energy.” Threads have become central to my work following a major surgery where I had experienced visions of people and objects emitting bright threads. Each of my compositions is unique in size and scale, determined by my relationship and collaboration with the camera and its mechanics at the picture-taking moment (the camera offers a metaphor for my relationship to/in the museum). Equally composed of chance, intuition and a computational back and forth between human and machine, my photographic method is, for me, an extension of a contemplative exercise on the collective “we,” even when things often feels beyond our control.
-----------
This project is presented as part on a year-long theme at OCADU, "Transformational Ontologies."
I'm thankful to the Ontario Arts Council for exhibition assistance, and to OCADU and Pam Paterson for presenting this work.
