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, reclaim, 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.
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- Contributors
- Precarias a la Deriva
Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Women Adrift) is a feminist collective in Madrid that demonstrates the power of militant research and autonomist concepts in the current economy.
Letters & Handshakes is a collaboration of Greig de Peuter (Department of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University) and Christine Shaw (Blackwood Gallery and Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga).
Letters & Handshakes’ past projects include the exhibitions I stood before the source and Precarious: Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge, the forum Fighting Foreclosed Futures: Politics of Student Debt, and the symposium and micropublication Surplus3: Labour and the Digital.
Letters & Handshakes’ past projects include the exhibitions I stood before the source and Precarious: Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge, the forum Fighting Foreclosed Futures: Politics of Student Debt, and the symposium and micropublication Surplus3: Labour and the Digital.
Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Greig de Peuter collaborates on Cultural Workers Organize, an international research project exploring collective responses to precarity in the cultural and creative industries. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. He is a co-founder of Letters & Handshakes.
Greig de Peuter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches the contested political economy of media and cultural production, with an emphasis on work, labour, and employment. He is currently collaborating with Enda Brophy and Nicole Cohen on a multi-country study of precarious labour politics in creative industries. His most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford, is Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in The Fibreculture Journal, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Cultural Economy, and several anthologies. His article with Cohen and Brophy, “Interns, Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose—Literally),” received the 2013 Canadian Association of Journalists/Communication Workers of America—Canada Award for Labour Reporting. He has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and Letters & Handshakes (from 2014).
Greig de Peuter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches the contested political economy of media and cultural production, with an emphasis on work, labour, and employment. He is currently collaborating with Enda Brophy and Nicole Cohen on a multi-country study of precarious labour politics in creative industries. His most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford, is Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in The Fibreculture Journal, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Cultural Economy, and several anthologies. His article with Cohen and Brophy, “Interns, Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose—Literally),” received the 2013 Canadian Association of Journalists/Communication Workers of America—Canada Award for Labour Reporting. He has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and Letters & Handshakes (from 2014).
Design
Matthew Hoffman
Printing
Thistle Printing
Matthew Hoffman
Printing
Thistle Printing
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.
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.
Take Care
Macropublication produced on the occasion of the exhibition Take Care, September 11, 2017 – March 11, 2018.
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. Edited by Letters & Handshakes.
Free
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. Edited by Letters & Handshakes.
Free
Download macropublication
pdf
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.