Blackwood Gallery students publish digital collection exploring time and place during COVID-19

Since March, the clock and the calendar have behaved strangely. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown time off its regular course. At the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Blackwood Gallery, the art centre’s work-study students have spent the summer creating a digital publication, now live, exploring the phenomenon. It’s called Time Out. 

Students in the work-study program typically work as gallery attendants, supporting the centre’s offsite programming, and conducting outreach and research for upcoming Blackwood programs, but with the physical gallery closed, their work went digital. This semester’s work-study participants —James Legaspi, Jessica Velasco, Kaitlin Simpson, Nancy Hamdy and Camilla Peng — with support from Blackwood staff, sought to collect the perspective of fellow students during this strange time. They put out a call for art and writing that reflects upon the current moment and received submissions from across Canada. Time Out features a selection of 13 contributors, all students or recent graduates, working in media and methods from painting to mechanical installation to reportage.    

“We wanted to engage with how unsatisfactory the ending of the spring semester was,” says Legaspi, who is entering his fifth year in the UTM Art and Art History program and served as one of two curatorial research assistants on the work-study team. “Things like studio spaces, final critique sessions, gallery spaces and scheduled exhibitions, as well as exhibition opportunities themselves and networking opportunities, access to these were all cut or postponed indefinitely, so we wanted to make a space for emerging voices and to amplify these student voices. We wanted to provide an opportunity for peers to see how peers are thinking.”

In a photo series, for instance, Concordia University MFA student Karina Garcia Casanova documents the mess left beneath her 18-month-old’s high chair after each meal — the purple splats and saucey smears like AbEx paintings.

“When COVID-19 hit and daycares closed for nearly four months, I struggled with finding ways to work on my artistic projects while taking care of my two young children,” Casanova writes. She cleans the floor three times a day. It is a regular gesture of care, among many she performs, that goes mostly unnoticed. The photographs, she says, make that work visible.  

Another project, a digital painting by Toronto artist Troy A. Lawrence, depicts time spent in quarantine and the awesome powers of imagination. That follows a list, drafted in the early days of lockdown, counting activities its author, Sabryna R. Ekstein, missed: “Having a reason to wear jeans, reading at bars, museum visits, baseball, making out,” it goes.

The topics broached are numerous: health care, the environment, racism, gentrification, family, identity, capitalism, colonialism. And though accounts may seem isolated and disparate, Time Out illuminates the joints and corners, exposing the larger systems at work. It elegantly maps these many connections.

Simpson, a master of information student at U of T St. George and one of the work-study group’s new media assistants, says that’s precisely what she learned focusing so closely on this peculiar suspended period, with all its good and bad.

“Everyone is going through something different right now and that’s OK,” Simpson says. “We still have connection and we have community.”