Issue 01
July 2017
Edited by Letters & Handshakes
A serial broadsheet publication featuring commissioned essays, artists' projects, and interviews.
Issue 1 anticipates Take Care, a transdisciplinary project involving over 100 artists, activists, curators, and researchers (September 2017–March 2018)
24 pages
9 x 13in
Full colour
The Blackwood Issue 1 is available as a FREE download.
The Blackwood is a new serial broadsheet publication of the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. It is designed to circulate research and support creative inquiry in advance of an exhibition program. It sets out in search of a people yet to come.
Issue 1 anticipates Take Care, a transdisciplinary project involving over 100 artists, activists, curators, and researchers critically engaging the crisis of care. Curated by Letters & Handshakes, the project encompasses a five-month exhibition series, performances, workshops, and a publishing program organized around five circuits of care:
Labour of Curation: September 11–30, 2017
Care Work: October 16–November 4, 2017
Infrastructures and Aesthetics of Mutual Aid: November 20–December 9, 2017
Stewardship: January 8–27, 2018
Collective Welfare: February 12–March 10, 2018
If the task is to understand care as an enabling force, perhaps even as a basis for politics, we must navigate the contemporary dilemmas of care. Care is a complex relationship, and caring is an affective disposition that can be both oppressive and liberatory. Practices of care have an ethical dimension that has to do with how we value ourselves and others—as well as the natural environment that makes planetary life possible. This is not purely ideational: expressed in material, embodied practices, and inserted into the capital relation, practices of care become sites of struggle over the means to live well. What would a radical conception of collective care look like for our time?
-Excerpted from “Dilemmas of Care” by Emma Dowling (p. 10)
Albert Banerjee
Emma Dowling
Steven Eastwood
Lauren Fournier
Kassandra Hangdaan
Marisa Morán Jahn
Labrador Land Protectors
Carolyn Lazard
Anchi Lin
Park McArthur
Onaman Collective
Ai-jen Poo
Radiodress
Chloé Roubert
Lynx Sainte-Marie
Gemma Savio
Sarah Sharma
Tania Willard
Constantina Zavitsanos
Publisher: Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga
Editor: Letters & Handshakes
Designer: Matthew Hoffman
Copy Editor: Jeffrey Malecki
Printer: Thistle Printing Ltd.
Cover: Anchi Lin, To The Shore, 2014. Digital video and a broom, 3:37 minutes, looped. Courtesy the artist.
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
