MUSEUM IN WATER

 

MUSEUM IN WATER 

Photographs on canvas, found threads, wood frame

9 ft x 2.4 ft each

My photographs are a multi-perspectival form of looking. They are a means to both de-centralize my gaze, the power structures within which I move, whether art world broadly speaking, or other. The glitches, black surfaces of digital non-computes, become places of opportunity, and the blurry bits are sites of change. The strings that puncture through with a sewing needle are my image energy. Equally composed of chance, intuition, collaboration and a computational back and forth, the painterly installation is, for me, an extension of a contemplative exercise on the collective we.

Thank you to Annika Kapral at ArtspaceTMU for these beautiful installation shots! These two large works were the culmination of an 8 week residency this summer, 2025 at ArtspaceTMU, 401 Richmond, Toronto. The group show ran this fall, and was open for NUIT BLANCHE too. Here's a bit about my summer experience and the show:  

 Acknowledgements (September, 2025)

I am installing two of photographs that constitute the broader MUSEUM IN WATER dissertation project for a group exhibition entitled Routes/Rooting at ArtspaceTMU, located in the basement level gallery space at Toronto’s 401 Richmond Street arts hub building. This installation of panoramic photographs follows an 8-week residency for doctoral students in the Media and Design Innovation Program in the gallery. 

I have been enriched by the other artists and their work with whom I have shared this space: Deanna Armenti, Nia Campbell, Rosalina Libertad Cerritos, Stephen Severn and Erin Thurlow. I’ve also enjoyed studio visits with friends and gallery visitors who offered invaluable insights that changed and progressed the work. 

At the same time outside the studio time, as part of my doctoral research 23 people on their thoughts about transformational museum experience from the perspective of artists who also work or have worked in the museum. Most, like me, have worked at the AGO; others I have met through my AGO colleagues.

Dimitri Levanoff at Imagefoundry has built up my maker confidence, printing my photographic images over the past eight years with a seasoned eye; and Laboni Islam, Kelley Aitken and Deborah Nolan, our informal makers group, provided a salve of encouragement and editorial criticality to my poems. 

Artist Claire Greenshaw shared her research and drawing practice in an artist talk organized for ArtspaceTMU’s inaugural summer residency program designed by our doctoral colleague Andrew Lochhead in which I take part, and from which I write now, as we transition to installation and show. She has introduced me to American arts writer and author Elvia Wilk’s provocative book centred around science fiction by women, Death by Landscape (2022). And EMILIA-AMALIA's on going project including the summer program Open Hearing Hotline at Mercer Union, continues to inspire. 

My spoken text at the opening, September 18, 2025:

“MUSEUM IN WATER is an assembly of about 20 planned photographs and their threads: picture glitches, twisted stairs, strings reaching down into the earth. They progress toward loving the museum (again).  

During this residency Deanna Armenti introduced me to Notebook on TEXTILE PUNCTUM: embroidery of memory (2005), by Wronsov, who describes how a drop of red wine on their shirt at a party turned into a punctum. In an instant, their relationship to people, the space and everything around them had changed because of the stain on their shirt. Embroidering and memorializing their stain invited, amongst other things, a new form of seeing oneself in relation to others and other things, space and time. Wronsov’s reframing of Roland Barthes’s photo punctum into an eventing space became a way for me to think about the museum in its entirety as a stain. 

If the museum is my fourth space made from images of Mel Lastman Square and the AGO’s Walker Court, and of metaphors of darkness, sewers and swampy waters inspired by Walter Benjamin’s posthumous Arcades Project (1982), a museum in water/MUSEUM IN WATER roots these stories and their entanglements with my own work in the museum here now.”

Breaststroke

Nights swim into sky

collecting suns:

an admiral

and a pantaloon

as if, the suns would cede them

to touch

between surface and void

a pleasant time

for these swimmers

our diatribe (or school) 

against competitive stroke 

melts away

We have joined instead the ancient

Society for the Recovery of Persons

Apparently Drowned

where optimism has no heat

or cold.

It just is.”