Take Care

Featuring an excerpt by Precarias a la Deriva, a curatorial text by Letters & Handshakes, an overview of the five circuits of Take Care, and full colour illustrations throughout.

 

This macropublication was produced on the occasion of the exhibition Take Care, September 11, 2017–March 11, 2018.

Curated by Letters & Handshakes

 

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Information

take care: to tend to; to sustain; to express empathy; to caution against risks; to appropriate or extract, with no or little compensation, a human capacity perceived as an infinitely replenishable gift; to politicize, reclam, organize, or revalorize care...

Encompassing a five-part exhibition series, performances, and workshops, Take Care follows a 2016 group exhibition, curated by Letters & Handshakes, at the Blackwood Gallery. That exhibition, I stood before the source, featured artists confronting the aesthetic problem of representing contemporary capitalism, and concluded with this impulse: to imagine a “shift from the metrics of accumulation to the requirements of care as an ordering principle of social relations.” [1] Immediately, however, this statement encounters the “crisis of care,” [2] the problematic within, against, and beyond which Take Care mobilizes 200 artists, activists, curators, and researchers.

 

NOTES

[1] Letters & Handshakes, “I stood before the source,” I stood before the source (Mississauga: Blackwood Gallery, 2016), 32. See also Precarias a la Deriva, “A Very Careful Strike - Four hypotheses,” trans. Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren, in The Commoner, no. 11 (2006): 42.
[2] On the crisis of care, see: Precarias a la Deriva, “A Very Careful Strike”; Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” in New Left Review 100 (2016): 99-117, and “Capitalism’s Crisis of Care: A Con-
versation with Nancy Fraser,” in Dissent (Fall 2016): 30-37; Emma Dowling, “Love’s Labour’s Cost: The Political Economy of Intimacy,” Verso blog (13 February, 2016): http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2499-love-s-labour-s-cost-the-political-economy-of-intimacy; Radiodress, in consultation with Syrus Marcus Ware, ed., MICE 02: Healing Justice (Fall 2016): http://micemagazine.ca/issue-two.

Credits

Curatorial text: Letters & Handshakes

Image credit: Claire Fontaine, Untitled (Rust & Tears)(detail), 2017. Digital image printed on acrylic billboard, 72 x 108in. Courtesy the artist.

Design: Matthew Hoffman

Printing: Thistle Printing

How To Order

To order any of our publications, please send an email including title(s), number of copies, and your mailing address to: michael.dirisio@utoronto.ca

Acknowledgments

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.

 

 

The Blackwood Gallery is grateful for additional support for Take Care from the Department of Visual Studies (UTM); Jackman Humanities Institute; McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology; MidAtlantic Arts Foundation; Outreach, Conference and Colloquia Fund (Office of the VP Research, UTM); SSHRC-funded research project Cultural Workers Organize; University of Toronto Affinity Partners Manulife, TD Insurance, and MBNA; UTM 50 Legacy Fund; and Women and Gender Studies (UTM).

Funding for additional staff support was made possible through the Young Canada Works in Heritage Organizations program, Department of Canadian Heritage. The Canadian Museums Association administers the program on behalf of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

 

 

Special thanks
The Blackwood Gallery and Letters & Handshakes are indebted to long-term collaboration, mutual aid, and knowledge-sharing amongst our peers and colleagues. For Take Care we send a special thank you to all the artists, curators, and program contributors, as well as the following individuals: Martin Arnold, Ana Barajas, Franco Boni, Emelie Chhangur, Nicole Cohen, Amrita Daniere, Massimo De Angelis, Kaye Francis, Britt Gallpen, Ulli Krull, Brandy Leary, Park McArthur, Gabrielle Moser, Vicky Moufawad-Paul, Kris Noakes, Anu Radha Verma, John Paul Ricco, Danny Russell, Daniella Sanader and Milka Vujnovic, Sarah Sharma, Joan Simalchik, Danielle St-Amour, Bryan Stewart, Alison Syme, Tess Takahashi and Mike Zyrd, Peter Urbanek, Shalon Webber-Heffernan, Alley Wilde, Juliana Zalucky, Constantina Zavitsanos, and the Blackwood Gallery Advisory Board.

Related Projects

Take Care
Curated by Letters & Handshakes
September 11, 2017–March 11, 2018