Skated on Ice and Stone (ICED)

Skated

 

 

 

GROUP EXHIBITION: MACHINE

Curator: Lee Petrie

Gladstone House 

January 16 - April 28, 2026

Paola Poletto: Skated on Ice and Stone, 2026
7 single edition archival photographs on canvas with found threads.
Positioned on the grand staircase of Gladstone House
Presented as part of DesignTO

 
AND

Paola Poletto: MUSEUM IN WATER (ICED)
 
Curators: Pam Patterson & Grace MacDonald
 
 
January 27- April 15, 2026
3 single edition archival photographs on canvas with found threads.
Positioned in the gallery's vitrine gallery at OCADU
Presented as part of "Transformational Ontologies"
 
Walker Court IV

 

In MUSEUM IN WATER (ICED), premiering at OCADU's 113Research, photographs “glitch” the landscape as a liberatory gesture. Using vignettes drawn from her 12-year experience as an artist-worker in one of Canada’s leading contemporary art museums, Poletto explores and extends the perceptions she has gained by pairing images from two sites—one site embodies her as a practicing artist, and the other as museum worker. Each is respectively represented by her use of Toronto’s civic reflecting pool at Mel Lastman Square located near her home, and by her reimagining AGO’s Walker Court as a “professional” reflective pool.

Walker Court III



For over four years, using photography as creative and critical strategy, she has generated multi-perspectival readings of sites or events as a means to de-centralize her gaze and to expose power structures. The intention has been to "destabilize" the viewer's gaze in a meaningful way. Glitches, black surfaces of digital non-computes, become places of “opportunity”, and blurry fragments represent sites of "movement and change”. Each of her compositions is unique in size and scale, determined by her relationship and collaboration with the camera and its mechanics. Equally composed by chance, intuition, and a computational back and forth between human and machine, the painterly installation is, for her, an extension of a contemplative exercise focusing on the collective “we”. 

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Fall


 
Skated on Ice and Stone at Gladstone House runs concurrently to ICED. Both exhibiting sites comprise a seasonal narrative in the MUSEUM IN WATER project that expands on Poletto's research question, “What is a transformational museum experience?” 
Museo Nacional de Antropologia
 
 
 
Skated on Ice and Stone presents seven large-scale single edition photographic works imbued with found threads. 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. Their reaction challenges the image’s illusion, breaking its fourth wall by responding to our corporeal selves. 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 with machines, broken bodies and spirits. 
 
Walker Court II
 
Curator Lee Petrie writes, “our relationships with machines and technology are complex.” Poletto engaged with this idea by inserting the museum as a place filled with complexities. The project builds on the double body idea Poletto has been pursuing in her research-creation project, connecting museum and civic spaces personal to her as central watering holes. The hotel as a temporary dwelling place contributes to the narrative of her museum story.
Tree

The Gladstone House’s grand staircase, opulent with green plants and natural light, has gathered both travellers and the local arts ecosystem for decades (Poletto co-facilitated a “secrets room” in the hotel around 2000!). She is interested to see how its legacy in the city both parallels the museum as a meeting place outside our home/work, and perhaps outperforms it. Or, maybe, it changes our relationship to spectacular places of “belonging,” “safety,” and “comfort.”
 
Walker Court I

 

Paola Poletto is an artist and arts professional based in Toronto, Canada. She is interested in multi-voiced creative narratives and is currently pursuing practice-based doctoral research in Media and Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University. She aims to make a new museum experience map focused on artist-worker perspectives through an auto-theory lens. Poletto is also the independent co-producer of art/lit projects including OOL (Office of Life), an imprint she started in 2019.

The artist thanks the Ontario Arts Council for exhibition assistance. 





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