Jacket Image: Tania Willard, Only Available Light (detail) from the series Only Available Light, 2016. Photo: Dennis Ha. Courtesy the artist and grunt gallery.

Take Care’s fourth circuit, Stewardship, decentres the isolated individual as the privileged recipient or the primary site of care. Against the calamitous futures wrought by extractivism and the state forces that enable it, this circuit explores stewardship as a potential counter-modality of caretaking. Relationality, shared responsibility, custodianship, interdependency, community governance, and intergenerationality: the contested lexicon of stewardship is difficult to avoid in efforts to respond to the crises of care cascading across multiple domains of life—ecological, social, cultural, political. Stewardship scales up care, and names the relational work of tending to a world, a resource, an artefact, a memory, a community, a knowledge system, an institution, a future. Stewardship forefronts ideas and practices of care that centre upon relationships to land, territory, and water, and that undo hierarchies between human and nonhuman. While irreducible to stewardship alone, this circuit’s exhibition—#callresponse—repositions the crisis of care within and against the intersecting forces of the nation state, colonialism, land dispossession, and patriarchy. As co-organizer Tarah Hogue writes in relation to #callresponse, “the resistance of Indigenous peoples exposes the precarity of settler sovereignty and opens possibilities for alternate conceptions of care and responsibility towards one another.”1

—Letters & Handshakes

How To Order

To order any of our publications, please send an email including title(s), number of copies, and your mailing address to: blackwood.gallery[at]utoronto.ca.

1
Design
Matthew Hoffman

Printing
Thistle Printing
#callresponse is co-organized by Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfield, and Tania Willard. We acknowledge the politics of violence in North America as it relates to Indigenous lands and bodies including on the many Indigenous territories where the projects take place, whether they are ancestral, traditional, unceded, unsurrendered, urban, rural and/or reserve.

#callresponse, Blackwood Gallery, and Letters & Handshakes extend deepest thanks to all the participating artists, respondents, and the networks that support the important work they undertake at all levels. Thank you also to those who have led and participated in the programming around the exhibition.

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.

This exhibition is organized and circulated by grunt gallery, and presented by Blackwood Gallery.

#callresponse is produced in partnership with grunt gallery and generously supported by the {Re}conciliation initiative of the Canada Council for the Arts, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. Additional funding support from the British Columbia Arts Council.

The Blackwood Gallery is grateful for the generous support of #callresponse from the Jackman Humanities Institute Artist-in-Residence Program, the BC Arts Council, and grunt gallery, with additional support from the Department of Visual Studies and Women and Gender Studies (UTM).

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

Stewardship

Christi Belcourt, IV Castellanos, Marcia Crosby, Maria Hupfield, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Ursula Johnson, Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff, Tanya Tagaq, Tania Willard, Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory

Micropublication produced on the occasion of Stewardship, Circuit 4 of Take Care, January 8–17, 2018. Co-organized and curated by Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfield, and Tania Willard.

Featuring project descriptions, a curatorial essay by the members of #callresponse, artist biographies, and full colour illustrations throughout. Edited by Letters & Handshakes.

Free
Download micropublication
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.
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