2025-2026 Projects
2025-2026 Thematic: Transformational Ontologies
We live in a
time when the validity of what is central to our existence is being questioned.
Democratic social and political beliefs, structures, and institutions are being
dismantled, AI is replicating/replacing our very thoughts, writings, and images,
and we are acquiring our healthcare, clothing, even our food via web platforms. These changes lead us as artists and designers
to activate critical and creative strategies to investigate these ontological breaks.
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?
Opening Sept 29th 2025
COVID-19: Effects, Apathy and Betrayal
by Joanna Black
Curated by Pam Patterson
In COVID-19: Effects, Apathy and Betrayal, Joanna Black views the ontological COVID-19 pandemic disruption of government protections through the lenses of commerce, work, leisure, histories, and political sites. Through this research creation project, she has been critically investigating the now long-standing impacts of COVID-19. By digitally manipulating photographic images, she captures people during the pandemic living their lives: at home, in public areas, at places of businesses, and in the institutional spaces they access.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020, the world has become increasingly tumultuous and precarious. According to the World Health Organization, there have been close to eight hundred million reported cases of COVID-19, and six out of every hundred people develop long COVID—currently, there are approximately two million Canadians who are COVID “long haulers”. Many, in those early pandemic days, experienced isolation, and sickness, witnessed death, or died. But now, COVID-19 has mutated, and new variants have emerged; people are still becoming ill.
Since 2022, protests—such as the truckers’ convoy that converged in Ottawa—called for a halt to COVID-19 public health restrictions. As a result, public policies and governmental approaches have radically and markedly altered: there is now censorship of pandemic information, a stripping down of COVID-19 protections, and a dismantling of healthcare systems. Proper treatment of, protection from, and relevant information on COVID-19 are no longer mandated or necessarily easily available — including masks, COVID-19 rapid tests, vaccines, filtered air in public institutions (including schools), and antivirals such as Paxlovid. A perfect storm is rising. Given the ongoing climate crisis, many researchers warn other pandemics are imminent. A healthcare crisis also looms due to lack of governmental concern and chronic medical/research underfunding.
Post COVID-19, social inequities have been widening, especially for those who are elderly, racialized, or otherwise vulnerable. There is growing criticism of academic and scientific research and expertise. Democracy is being challenged, and our governments are failing us. Increasingly, administrations have shifted personal care responsibility onto the individual. In short, we are experiencing institutional betrayal. How can we reduce these human costs? Is there another way?
Joanna Black (artist/researcher in residence) (BA Fine Arts & English Literature; MA, PhD in Arts Education) has since 1989 been active in visual art as an artist, curator, and speaker. She is a professor at the University of Manitoba in visual art education and is cross-appointed as an Adjunct Professor at the School of Art, University of Manitoba. Additionally, she has been recently (2019-2024) appointed as a Research Fellow at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University, Halifax, Canada. . She has also served as a Senior Artist/Researcher in Residence for the WIAprojects, Center for Women Studies in Education (CWSE), at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. She currently teaches visual art and digital art education at the University of Manitoba.
Black’s research, visual work, curating and teaching have centered upon creative digital art practices, feminist art, women in academia, human rights issues, learning for social change, and environmental art education. As a result of her research and art making she has published books, articles, reviews in a variety of journals, art catalogues, and exhibition catalogues. For over thirty years she has worked as an art educator, art director, museum educator, curator, art consultant, and a visual art educator in formal and informal settings in Canada and the United States. Formerly she worked at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art near Atlanta Georgia teaching drawing, painting and sculpture. Black has received awards from the National Art Education Associations' (NAEA) Art Education Technology (AET) for Outstanding Research Award; the Centre for Human Rights Research at the University of Manitoba; The Manitoba Education Research Network’s (MERN) Research Achievement Award; and the Provincial Affiliate Art Educator Award from the Canadian Society for Education through Art. She has recently co-written a book, along with Juan Carlos Castro and Ching-Chiu Ling entitled, “Youth Practices in Digital Arts and New Media: Learning in Formal and Informal Settings published by Palgrave MacMillan in New York.
Black has worked curating exhibitions in Atlanta Georgia planning shows including the artist, Milton Avery and Indigenous artwork from the American Deep South. She has been the Canadian co-curator for international art exhibitions held in Tallinn Estonia in 2011, 2014 and 2017 working with other artists, curators, art business leaders and educators throughout Europe. In Ireland she was co-curator for a travelling show that was held in three galleries in the country and she worked curating a national exhibition that was held in Germany. She has spoken at close to 80 international and national conferences. Recently, she has been a guest speaker dealing with such topics as, How can Artists Bridge the Communication Gap Between Art and Society and she was on a recent panel to discuss Overlapping Violent Histories: A curatorial Investigation into Difficult Knowledge at the University of Manitoba.
Black has exhibited her new media, paintings, multimedia and performance artworks in Canada and the United States in solo and group shows. Her focus has always been on the political: art for social change including the environment, human rights issues, and feminist issues. While socially engaged art, as a category of practice, is still a working construct, the artist who identifies as such is an individual whose specialty includes working professionally with/in society. In a similar vein Black believes in and encourages her students to focus not only internally in critical and creative making, but also outwardly among each other and in company with community. A complex dialogue ensues where social critique, understanding, and engagement are valued in relation to human rights issues. Her recent new media and performance artworks include Babble/Babel proVOKing CO-llaBORation/IN/performance at the University of Toronto; Provocation at OCADU Toronto; new media art, ECHoes & ReVERBS @ Ivory Towers at the CWSE Gallery, Toronto and MAWA Gallery Winnipeg; and new media art, Making Time: A Digital Exhibition, Audain Art Center, Vancouver.
Joanna Black thank and acknowledges the University of Manitoba for funding support.
Opening January 27- April 15, 2026
This exhibition is an exploration and representation of vignettes that draw from my experience as an artist-worker in one of Canada’s leading contemporary art museums.
My photographs “glitch” the landscape as a liberatory gesture. I will make pairings of two sites for a series of vignettes that reflect on my personal and professional experience as a museum worker and practicing artist: the one at Toronto’s civic reflecting pool at Mel Lastman Square located near my home, and the other of the AGO’s Walker Court that I have reimagined, metaphorically speaking, as a reflecting pool too, where I worked for twelve years. I have been walking to compose my photographs in both locations over the past 4 years, forcing a multi-perspectival form of looking upon a site or event and a means to both de-centralize my gaze within it, the power structures within which I move, whether art world broadly speaking, or other, and to "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 their surface with needle and thread are “image energy.” Each of my compositions is unique in size and scale, determined by my relationship and collaboration with the camera and its mechanics. Equally composed of chance, intuition and a computational back and forth between human and machine, the painterly installation is, for me, an extension of a contemplative exercise on the collective “we.”
My art work includes photography, writing and creative direction. 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 and with far-ranging contexts including bars, libraries, telephone booths and reflecting pools; immersive theatres, websites and zoom calls; bookmarks, zines and scholarly books; shopping malls, gas stations and other transit terminals; and galleries and museums.
Paola Poletto is an artist and arts professional based in Toronto, Canada. She is interested in multi-voiced narratives about creativity. She is the independent co-producer of art/lit projects including OOL (Office of Life), an imprint she started in 2019.
Poletto is currently pursuing practice-based doctoral
research in Media and Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University.
This research aims to make a new museum experience map focused on artist-worker
perspectives through an auto-theory lens. It includes a blog where she
writes about what she is learning and thinking about for a transformational
museum experience. It is ordered by panoramic images of the reflecting pool at
Mel Lastman Square in North York, a series she took over 10 months during COVID
lock down and titled Glitch in 2022.
It moves through additional images she took of the AGO's
Walker Court, where she considers the symbolic resonances of a seasonal and
cyclical water cycle and the metaphor of the pool with site-specificity and her
own position stitching the narrative.
Delina Yohannes (TBC)
