Oct 17, 2024

The emerging artist's way

Paola Poletto, AGO Director of Engagement and Learning, reflects on the AGO x RBC Emerging Artists Program.

I’m Allergic to Archival Dust by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, installation shot at OPENHAUS at ZK/U, Berlin, Germany, 2023. Photo by Ivetta SUnyoung Kang.

The 2024 iteration of the AGO x RBC Emerging Artist Program has been defined by the concept of movement, and its many potentials. The AGO’s open call for artists-in-residence at the beginning of 2024 has resulted in robust residencies completed by artists Sharl G. Smith, Michelle Peraza and Karl Mata Hipol. And earlier this fall, a three-part comprehensive workshop led by Mexican scholar and artist Francisco Guevara offered guidance to emerging artists in search of residencies.

To close out the year, Paola Poletto, AGO Director of Engagement and Learning, will be in conversation on October 23 with artist and researcher Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Director of Program Partnerships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Haema Sivanesan. Encouraging participation from the audience, they will critically consider the opportunity offered by artist residency programs from different perspectives—both inside and outside cultural institutions. Each panelist offers an entry point into thinking about artist residencies through facilitating or participating in residency programs.

Foyer recently spoke with Poletto, head of the AGO x RBC Emerging Artist Program, to get a recap of the year and learn more about the conversation on October 23.

Foyer: Can you describe the theme and approach of this year’s AGO x RBC Emerging Artist Program?

Poletto: This year, we wanted to explore the idea of movement in all its broadest terms. Our open call for artists-in-residence was the first program under this umbrella that began to shape what movement would look like, artist-led, and what happened is that all three artists-in-residence foregrounded their diasporic experiences. Sharl Smith wanted to express her bead weaving as movement and represent it through performing bodies. Her research and making during the residency in the spring took her back to Jamaica before presenting her final work. Michelle Peraza traced every material she uses in the studio to its origin and went to Mexico to hone some of her techniques and process-based thinking before starting her residency at the AGO. Karl Hipol Mata travelled back to The Philippines to see family and strengthen his weaving techniques before continuing from B.C. to Toronto to begin his residency and close looking at representations of water in some of the AGO’s major works on view to create his representational land and seascapes.

Pursuing our responsibilities to movements – rooted as they inescapably are in colonizing -- and to movement as a process, we just finished a three-part workshop facilitated by Mexico-based scholar and artist Francisco Guevara and co-hosted by Jesse King and me. It was fascinating and telling to be joined online by artists from around the world. Francisco encouraged us to use our powers to distort place into space; and to de-center the margins, where place might be described but space is actualized, where places resort and rely on mappings, and spaces enter relationships.

Foyer: What should attendees expect to learn about artist residencies from the upcoming conversation on October 23?

Poletto: I envision that the performance-talk between Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Haema Sivanesan, myself and all who join our circle, can bring back the rhythms and intuitions of being in these spaces and this spatial moment together. As Guevara says, questions posed to one another acknowledge places in order to open up spaces. Our aim is that everyone feels welcome and seen in this space we will find ourselves in for the workshop, hosted in The Marvin Gelber Print and Drawing Centre, symbolically and tangibly entangling us in visual histories. Our questions will point us to process rather than fixity, to relationality rather than object, to the economic values of movements and those peripheral movements that are undervalued, and to unfamiliar joys and visibilities.

Artist Residencies in Question and Conversation happens on Wednesday, October 23 in the Marvin Gelbert Print and Drawing Centre, on Level 1 of the AGO. Book your free tickets here. Find out more about the AGO x RBC Emerging Artists Program here.