2025-2027 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.
 |
| "Escape", Paola Poletto, 2025 |
Opening January 27- April 15, 2026
MUSEUM IN WATER (ICED)
Paola Poletto
(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.
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.
Sequence for 113Research
Annex Gallery:
Iced 44" X 42"
Walker Court III
Paola Poletto
233 Beecroft Rd. #108, Toronto, ON M2N 6Z9
647-355-5070
Ashlynn Doljac
Ashlynn's exhibit presents, as corresponding photographs and
paintings, work which reveals her inquiries as artist and researcher, into intergenerational
trauma, and uncovers her personal journey to recovery. Like a pendulum, the
viewer’s eyes swing from looking at startling black and white, almost abstract
images that sear the pictorial ground to brightly coloured, intentionally naively
rendered paintings that depict joy, love, and familial harmony. In the spaces
between, places are opened for the viewer to discover potential stories of
recovery.
Ashlynn Doljac is a multi-disciplinary artist, poet, art teacher, and member of the Connection Earth Collaborative, passionate about using art as a healing modality for self expression and growth. She is also an art healing practitioner, who has had solo exhibitions in galleries such as Sho Gallery in Windsor, and Gallery 1313 in Toronto.
Ashlynn has been involved with Animal
Rights and climate change activism since 2020, and is currently a safety
Marshall with Toronto Pig Save. Watercolour painting and poetry are two of her
biggest pursuits as she uses art to inspire others to live in alignment with
their values & truly embody the peace they wish to see in the world.
