lawrence

toby

Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures was a Project Room Studio creative residency undertaken at Comox Valley Art Gallery in Courtenay, BC throughout April 2019.

This creative research residency engaged the relationality of knowledge (referencing Shawn Wilson, 2008) by making space in a public art gallery for conversation and investigation around ideas of curatorial hospitality through visiting and scholarship review. Discussants found their way into the space through invitation and happenstance. Given the small scope of the residency and budget, I intentionally extended invitation to practitioners in my primary and local network and with whom the development of these ideas began—Michelle Jacques, chief curator at Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Angela Somerset, curator at Comox Valley Art Gallery; and Jennifer Van de Pol, Victoria-based artist and educator. Troy Moth and Celine Trojand of Art Tahsis were also invited to participate in conversation and in a corresponding gathering on compassionate practice hosted by the CVAG curators. Additional artists and curators were invited to join me as discussants, but were unavailable during the residency period. Phone conversations during the residency and subsequent meetings with my Bread, Flesh & Ink collaborators, Krista Arias and Lindsay Harris, have been instrumental in developing this dialogue further.

its roots and its innovative departures

April 12-27, 2019
gather:place | COMOX VALLEY ART GALLERY, COURTENAY, BC

curatorial researcher: Toby Lawrence

April 18, 20, 25, 26, 27 – Toby Lawrence onsite / guest discussants / community drop-in

April 13 – Compassionate Practice Research Gathering

April 16, 17, 23, 24 – Pause – self directed / community drop in

project room studio schedule:

Through greater attentiveness and sustained commitment to local relevance, the centralization of gestures of hospitality supports nuanced modes of acknowledging, thinking, and practicing together through our differences. Curatorial hospitality engages reciprocity and a continual negotiation of the boundaries of guest-host relations, and through action and ethics, suspends the mythic singularity of the curatorial. This research intentionally puts name to actions to make visible, “to revive” (Somerset 2018), and to explore gestures of curatorial hospitality, wherein guest and host meet one another at the door, so to speak, both prepared to share in the responsibilities, to give and to receive, knowing that “all parties enter collaborations with expertise and that art historical expertise is no more valuable than other kinds of competencies” (Marstine 2014). Within the space of the curatorial, gestures of hospitality function as methodologies for engaged encounters, dialogue, collaboration, and care amongst artists, audiences, communities, and cultural workers. Audre Lorde reminds us: “Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences” (1983). Its Roots and its Innovative Departures sets curatorial hospitality as a framework and grounding for coming together in our differences, echoing Lorde.

“How can thinking of the curatorial in terms of hospitality be used to critically analyze the parameters of curatorial practice, and thus lend insight into its socio-political relevance in particular?” – Beatrice Von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer

Hospitality weaves through the experiential and physical elements of an exhibition. It is present in the ways in which relationships are nurtured, and visitors, contributors, and knowledges are cared for through the support and facilities provided. Considered in the context of curation, relational complexities flow between guest and host and, particularly in North America, the Indigenous territories in which exchange takes place. For Maurice Hamington, “hospitality operates at the border of membership, but it is precisely at the border where learning takes place—learning about self and Others through confronting difference. Expanding the notion of guest inclusion unlocks the epistemic power of hospitality.”
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The augmented journal entries included in this chapter are a brief representation of numerous hours of dialogue that took place throughout April 2019, articulating a process of discerning curatorial behaviours that enable and hinder conciliatory narratives. My selection is, of course, subjective; framed through my perspective as a seventh generation European-settler Canadian and the responsibilities to unlearn and relearn the histories of Canada bestowed on me through this inherited legacy. This text does not capture the entirety of the conversations and activities that took place; however, it aims to address common threads across conversations, readings, and observations—particularly expectations, power, boundaries, and care. The fragmented nature of these entries further demonstrates the non-linear pathways of knowledge, and many questions rest unresolved.
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Week 1
April 12, 2019—Radical Practice

I began week one by reading Cultivating Joy as Radical Practice.

“the performativity of negation” (Devora to Jen)

I exhaled so deeply when I read this line.

I had read it wrong, but it still shaped my perspective. I had read “negativity.” My thoughts were directed to cultures of busyness and exhaustion that are frequently sustained within gallery culture and result in unnecessary negative interactions and neglectful practices. “Toxicity (whether environmental or psychological) has to be first acknowledged, absorbed and transformed before wellness—and by extension, joy—is possible.” How can curatorial hospitality bring us to generative and ethical places of being and working in relation?
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I also want to understand where curation is inhospitable, to recognize learned patterns and behaviours of professional practice that arrest creative growth and hinder relationship building, truth-telling, and (re)conciliation based in trust, support, and accountability.
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Week 3
April 23, 2019—Describing Hospitality

“The business of inviting, hosting, and of playing the role of a guest is a delicate one. One always has to negotiate between how one is expected to behave in somebody else’s space and the limits of the invitation. At the same time, one needs to define the thin line between one’s generosity and what one expects from the encounter with others.” – Mario Gracia Torres

“Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, not the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” – Audre Lorde
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April 25, 2019—Thresholds

I stopped for coffee at the Vault in Nanaimo, as I often do, on my way to Courtenay this morning. There, I read an interview between Jacques Derrida and Dominique Dhombres for Le Monde from December 2, 1997. Derrida’s work Of Hospitality is featured frequently in the scholarship on hospitality. He talks of thresholds. The citations are ubiquitous. “Nowadays, a reflection on hospitality presupposes, among other things, the possibility of a rigorous delimitation of thresholds or frontiers: between the foreign and the non-foreign, the citizen and the non-citizen, but first of all between the private and the public, private and public law, etc.” My first visitor today refused to cross the threshold. An abstract line drawn between architectural points delineating the corridor from the studio. She stopped. I extended a pleasant invitation. She hesitated. She shifted her torso over the ‘line,’ with feet firmly planted in the corridor. Perhaps she misheard me. I restated and re-extended the invitation, but she contorted her face, refused again, and left. Thresholds.

April 27, 2019—Power

Returning to the gallery in the final week, I continue to reflect on the effectiveness of the format of Its Roots and Its Innovative Departures, the fragmented nature of this residency and research, the appropriateness of research in public, as a curator, in a city where I do not reside, am not employed, and my community connections are few. What does a gallery ask of its visitors and its guests? of its curators? What are the responsibilities of the audience? During visits with invited discussants, I used prompts specific to each guest from past encounters to drive a semi-focused yet organic conversation. I found amidst these conversations, the specificities of “gestures of hospitality” were often made tangible through the stories told by my visitors.
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Today’s conversation with Jennifer Van de Pol and Nicole Crouch centered power and expectations. I set the space for visiting, and, arguably, for working in public view. Nonetheless, I continue to question how to manage boundaries through such immersive projects? Where is power located: When artists, communities, and curators (are asked to) put themselves on display? “To heal for others,” Nicole added.

Equally, where is power located: When objects, ideas, and culture are brought together in public spaces? When organizations, artists, curators, programmers invite contributions and contributors? in consultation? in community? with paid or unpaid participation? These are not new questions.