WIAprojects

Exercising Urbanism is a collaboration in urban exploration with local emerging artists and designers Ella Hough and Maya Freeman. Freeman and Hough will lead three drawing workshops in the city (at set locations in Parkdale, Cabbagetown, and Chinatown) that aim to help us re-examine the city critically, imaginatively, and playfully. The drawings that develop from the workshops will make up the installation of the Window Box Gallery. With each subsequent workshop, drawings will become layered in the window box as the experiences of the city’s secret corners and alleyways are reimagined as hubs for creative expression and informal gathering.  Participation in the workshops is free (pre-registration required) and materials will be supplied. To register, please email: exercisingurbanism@gmail.com. Artists Maya Freeman is a designer based in Toronto, Canada. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Toronto in 2021. Maya is motivated by the possibilities that

In exploring the demarcation of exoticism and otherness in international food aisles,  Grocery  interjects sculpted replicas of cultural foods into their broader corresponding food categories. Photographed   in   Walmart   grocery   aisles,   Lu   deconstructs   habitual   exotification   by   asserting   that sesame oil is oil, black rice vinegar is vinegar, and shrimp chips are chips. The disruption of imposed otherness re-envisions the potential of cultural foods in building, diversifying, and nourishing communities. Bridget Lu/  晓茶  is a Chinese-Canadian artist, science enthusiast, and aspiring medical illustrator. Her practice includes painting, sculpture, printmaking, and digital media— often taking   form   in   multi-media   works. Lu   explores   and   integrates   cultural   identity,   design   practices and biological concepts— currently focusing on the generational loss of culture through diasporic migration and the use of everyday scenes and objects. Curated by: Ella Tay

ARTIFACTS (Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee) with Josephine Guan, Sean Lee (Tangled Arts & Disability),  WIAprojects, and Gallery 1313. have been engaged this summer in the Alter(c)ations Project. This has included Josephine Guan's   The Artist is Napping   in the Window Box Gallery and Raudvee & Patterson's exhibit   Alter(c)ations   in the Cell Gallery. This project also marks the culmination of the exhibit series by disability artists entitled   Through a Glass Lightly . All exhibits are at Gallery 1313. Alter©ations , as exhibition, illuminates a companionship in which there is a search for knowledge not only of the much-loved other but of the social milieu each inhabits. This complex pairing of feminist disability artists leads to the inevitable – though in our case, rare, after 40 years of collaboration – moments of disagreements. But these often spark longer conversations and a deeper understanding. As Donna Haraway (2003) so rightly asserts, “‘communication’” a

  Window Box Gallery @ Gallery 1313, 1313 Queen Street West, June 1 - Sept. 2022 Josephine Guan  is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher. She is interested in cultural understandings of health and disability and knowledge that stems from lived experience. She has recently extended that practice into documenting the lived experience of others through different modes of storytelling for awareness and change. Her work often takes form as multi-media and assemblage. This installation for the Window Box Gallery @1313 is part of a master’s research project (OCAD University) investigating the lived experience of acquired brain injury. My brain is sometimes leaky – sometimes foggy. That means constantly negotiating how much I do in a day. I survived my way through grad school propped up by the central premise of Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry: that rest is a tool for liberation and healing. I resist the urge to perform busyness and resist testing the limits of my body by napping. I ask f

Cecily Ou & Ella Taylor will be joining WIAprojects as Emerging Curators for the Window Box Gallery at Gallery 1313!  Much thanks to Phil Anderson for supporting this program for graduating OCADU curatorial students. Cecily Ou is a writer, curator, and independent textile practitioner based in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations in Tkaronto. Her practice is focused on community-based projects, de-centralized arts production, and the insurgent influence of craft media within cultural institutions. Recent publications are found in The Senses and Society. She is currently finishing her BA at OCAD University, where she is also on the advisory committee of Onsite Gallery. Ella Taylor is a curator, writer, and artist based in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations in Tkaronto. Ella’s work engages with pedagogies of place,

  Photo-ground by Miklos Legrady from video by Hri Neil  of ARTIFACTS in performance. Artists@Work: Bodies of Labour ARTIFACTS (Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee) Window Box Gallery @ Gallery 1313 1313 Queen Street West,  Toronto, ON. Feb 17 – April 30, 2022  ARTIFACTS (Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee) continue with their series Artists@Work within the context of, and by foregrounding the practices of, disability artists. The layering of time, histories, bodies, and conversations become significant here.  Decades of collaboration and the assistance of others are significant: Natalie Piper designed the “work” logo, Hri Neil made a video of ARTIFACTS in performance, and Miklos Legrady captured multiple stills from this video to create a complex photo-ground. The intent here in Bodies of Labour is to repurpose all this collective effort as legitimate labour.   Objects representative of ARTIFACTS’ tasks, installed in front of the ground, provide placeholders for the bodies of Raudvee