The Blackwood
Publication Coordinators Christine Shaw, Ellyn Walker, Karie Liao, Saša Rajšić, Fraser McCallum, Ada Bierling
The Blackwood is a contemporary art centre at the University of Toronto Mississauga dedicated to open, public research. We present curated exhibitions featuring the work of local, national, and international professional artists in on-campus gallery spaces; program off-site projects throughout the GTHA; support artistic research, commissions, and residencies; and foster transdisciplinary strategies for knowledge production and circulation via a robust publishing program.
Series Titles
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Correctional Service Canada Accommodation Guidelines: Mental Healthcare Facility is a sculptural artwork based on the Federal Correctional Facilities Accommodation Guidelines set by Correctional Service Canada (CSC). Obtained by the artist in 2015 via an access-to-information request, this 700-page document is used by CSC for the building, maintenance, and everyday operations of prisons. In a section titled “Mental Healthcare Facility,” CSC outlines the locations and spatial dimensions required for waiting rooms, bathrooms, and staff offices for prison mental healthcare wings. People with severe trauma and mental illnesses, due to a lack of resources for their care on the outside, are disproportionately imprisoned by CSC. Parallel ... -
Within mediated conditions, at some level everything becomes reduced to data. How do art practices collect data, circulate it, and themselves become data? How do artists and organizations reckon with the production and circulation of knowledge in increasingly online media environments? Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition examined how forms of digital storytelling, ethics, access, governance, and data sovereignty are being practiced in other disciplines. By looking at how media-makers across diverse fields are engaging with new technological tools and practices, The Mediatic Edition considered how these paradigms map onto artistic practice. In Back Up Your Data!, respondents to Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition reflect on new ... -
One of the greatest capacities of the medium of animation is its magic—the apparent bringing-to-life of a world of static objects, uncertain companions, and unruly agencies. Things move, they do, they feel the propulsion of awakened urgencies. This “magic,” in fact a technology of representation which cascades still images in order to undo the perceived stillness of the image, also illuminates a fundamental relationship between people and things. Animation activates non-human agency as observed by a spectator, a participant, a co-performer recognizing the coming-to-life of an object, an animal, a photographic or digital entity. It opens space for the sentience and ... -
Although the worlds we inhabit are invariably composed of sensations and sense-makings, it is a peculiar challenge to perceive ourselves sensing. Because our human-centred sensory habits are so difficult to discern, we can often mistake them for natural tendencies. As an attunement to the aesthetics of sensation, the exhibition Logics of Sense—presented in two parts at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga—examines sense-in-the-making, from the surface of incorporeal events to a multiplicity of decentralized perceptions, and from itinerant geo-methodologies to the various disciplinary frames and frameworks that artistic intelligence retrofits for emergent social and political realities. Logics of Sense 2: Implications (October ... -
Although the worlds we inhabit are invariably composed of sensations and sense-makings, it is a peculiar challenge to perceive ourselves sensing. Because our human-centred sensory habits are so difficult to discern, we can often mistake them for natural tendencies. As an attunement to the aesthetics of sensation, the exhibition Logics of Sense—presented in two parts at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga—examines sense-in-the-making, from the surface of incorporeal events to a multiplicity of decentralized perceptions, and from itinerant geo-methodologies to the various disciplinary frames and frameworks that artistic intelligence retrofits for emergent social and political realities. Logics of Sense 1: Investigations (September ... -
Inspired by discussions on radical imagination, Indigenous thought, collective intelligence, and plural ecology, Futurity Island invites participants to develop new habits of thought in this era of environmental crisis. It is a space to speculate on the usefulness of the concept of “sympoiesis” for imaging and working together in radical interdisciplinarity toward desirable futures. In the utopian regime, the moment of future is transformed into a representable topography of space. Future is a place—an island—a defined location that is better than ours. It is characterized both by separation and distanciation. The geography of a utopian island is manipulatable, as well as conceivable at ... -
We live in a time of accelerated global warming, environmental degradation, and radical transformations in the Earth’s ecosystems to the extent that life for future generations is becoming increasingly difficult. Despite our insight into the destructive effects of human impact on the Earth, we seem unable to act in accordance with this knowledge. One reason has to do with the abstract quality of scientific data, which tends to make it impalpable. Another has to do with the temporal character of the data; it seems that since the damage has already occurred it is too late to act. In addition to ... -
Examining nature symbolism, territorial resistance, and solidarity economies connected to land and water, two solo exhibitions by women artists trace the contours of embodiment and the agency of more-than-human worlds. Calgary-based Miruna Dragan’s When Either But Not Both Are True explores the limits of human comprehension alongside material manifestations of the unknown, the underground, and the under-worldly. Exploring dreaming, divination, energy economies, and logic systems, the project engages human relationships with the natural world in order to question our interactions with the physical spaces we inhabit. Those at the Great River-Mouth is based on Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo’s investigation of hydroelectric sites across Latin ... -
Take Care’s fifth circuit, Collective Welfare, glimpses typically sequestered and private spaces of care. The projects in this circuit juxtapose three sites of the institutional mediation of care: hospital, prison, hospice. These sites offer a reminder that the welfare state, in all its ambivalence, is a decisive front in the crisis of care. Reframing practices of individualized care as fundamentally social matters, this circuit works across video, photography, social media, and temporary architecture to bear witness to care’s pace, failure, and stratifications. Collective Welfare circulates images of the entanglement of the chronically ill body and the biomedical industrial complex; materially fabricates the incompatibility ...
