This exhibition was born out of a cross-organisational partnership that I helped to establish in 2018 between SAW Video in Ottawa (where I was working as Director of Programming from 2017-2019) and Critical Distance Centre for Curators in Toronto. As is outlined in detail in the catalog essay, the approach to the exhibition was built upon some common grounds of inquiry that were occurring at the overlap between the respective mandates, expertises and initiatives of these two centres, engaging as they were in media art and curatorial practice, respectively. The very act of exhibition-making mobilised the folding-together and extension of two bodies of knowledge that sought out and uncovered new approaches and methodologies through a co-contamination of each. Ultimately, the exhibition was taken up as a process through which to experiment with the following: 1) the presentation of time-based works within public, transitional spaces, 2) holistic strategies for accessibility which would treat audio and video description as creative processes and 3) a mode of ‘time-based curation’ that navigated the coexistence of various works through a negotiation of their temporal, rhythmic and syntactic registers.
Invited as guest curator for the exhibition, Public Syntax highlighted the distinct time-based practices and approaches of seven artists who I had either previously worked with at SAW Video or was currently engaged with on developing projects in Ottawa, such as those participating in the Video in the Public Sphere Working Group. Situated in-gallery at Critical Distance and across multiple public and semi-public spaces throughout Artscape Youngplace, the works in the exhibition were transposed from recent and ongoing programming initiatives being taken up at the Knot Project Space, an exhibition venue I launched at SAW Video in early 2018. Directly responding to Critical Distance’s mandate to ‘advance curatorial inquiry’ and ‘encourage collaborative frameworks,’ I approached working with the artists in the exhibition through a conversational mode that sought form ‘syntactical’ relations between various moving image, sound, text-based and performance practices, employing an emergent ‘collective editing’ process that nurtured small artist-cultures through which the linearity of ‘sequence’ became a vector on which to group-together. In the gallery and public spaces, artists in this exhibition generated their affinities and coexistences not through the question of where will we meet, but rather when will we occur?
Related Programming
Talk: Constructing Time, Amanda Beech. April 1, 2019. Critical Distance, Toronto.