Toby Lawrence is creating the space for big conversations about art, curation, and relationality. In connection with Krista Arias’ Earth Is My Elder exhibit, running now at Open Space, Lawrence has launched a podcast, In Relation: Engaging Curatorial Hospitality, to make these conversations accessible.
Arias and Lawrence met at the UBC Okanagan campus as PhD candidates through a supervisor and, along with Lindsay Harris, developed the artist collective Bread Flesh & Ink.
“One of the anchor points for the collaboration is one of the films that’s in the exhibition, Eating Our Ancestors,” says Lawrence, “and in addition to the ideas in Eating Our Ancestors, we’re also looking at food sovereignty and community connection… and guest/host relations.”
Bread Flesh & Ink began hosting small get-togethers that they called The Activist Potlucks. It was through these communal conversations that they began to explore their contributions to their collaboration and how to realize them.
“One of the questions that came up was, well, what is curatorial hospitality? What would that even mean? That question really started to build in my mind,” says Lawrence.
This concept of curatorial hospitality led Lawrence to explore it deeper at a research residency at Comox Valley Art Gallery, where she reworked the space into a research lab, doing readings and inviting people in for conversations.
“I sort of mind-mapped a lot of the research that I was coming across, and that led into the overarching project that I’m doing with Open Space throughout 2020 and into 2021, [also] called In Relation: Engaging Curatorial Hospitality,” says Lawrence.
Through her position at Open Space as the curator of special projects, Lawrence is expanding on these broad questions.
“[I’m] looking in particular at the ways in which we work in relation to one another and the ways in which process and protocols are established within art gallery spaces or within curatorial spaces,” says Lawrence, “and so part of the more tangible elements of this program is my facilitation of the programming mandate revisioning process, as well as the exhibition The Earth Is My Elder, and then the In Relation limited series podcast.”
The In Relation podcast is not an elaboration of Arias’ video-poetry work presented in The Earth Is My Elder; these new conversations are, however, rooted from collaboration between Lawrence, Arias, and Harris.
“The link between all of these components is essentially this ongoing dialogue around hospitality and what that means around the arts and our working in art administration or as artists or as curators,” says Lawrence.
These talks are not meant to be authoritative voices on curation and hospitality, and the medium of a podcast allows them to be recorded, returned to, and expanded upon as they continue.
“It’s very much a way of documenting ongoing and potentially unresolved conversation, so it’s not meant to be the definitive explanation of curatorial hospitality in any way,” says Lawrence. “[It’s] also a way to document all of the dialogical elements that go into the processes of building exhibitions and creating artwork and creating community around artwork.”
In Relation: Engaging Curatorial Hospitality
Tuesday, February 23 to April 2021
tobylawrence.ca/in-relation