Talk

Alongside Nicole Kelly Westman’s exhibition muddled mirage of memories escaping encapsulation, the artist invites two colleagues, friends and sisters—curators Peta Rake and Katarina Veljovic—to speak together about artistic practice and the fruitfulness and responsibility of centering care in arts communities. What does it mean to hold sustaining and porus relationships in an art community? Are there ways we can lean into vulnerability and intimacy in these relationships? What might it look like to witness the often invisible labour of garnering trust and respect?

Biographies

Nicole Kelly Westman is a visual artist of Métis and Icelandic descent that recognizes with indebted gratitude the artists that came before her and strenuously forged space, the curators that place care at the fore of their labour, the communities that foster confidence in her practice, and the institutions and organizations that implement policies prefacing relations of trust. As an artist, she enjoys practices of listening, watching, hosting, poeticizing, foraging, and sharing.

Peta Rake currently lives and works in Meanjin, Brisbane and Cavanbah, Byron Bay. She is the Senior Curator at University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane. She has held various roles at CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, including Co-Director of Creative Residencies, Visual + Digital Art Department and Curator of Walter Phillips Gallery/Banff International Curatorial Institute. Peta writes and edits regularly; she has most recently contributed poetry for artists Caroline Monnet, Maggie Groat and Morison Studio for their upcoming publications. Her writing has appeared in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Fillip, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Rearviews, Institutions by Artists, On Apology and the literary compendium “She would roll petite cigarettes, petite like her” with Jordanian curator Ola El Khalidi. Rake holds a Masters in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts.

Katarina Veljovic is a Toronto/Tkaronto based arts organizer and occasional curator, currently working as an Exhibitions Project Manager at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Previous to this role she worked as the Curatorial Research Assistant at the AGO for the exhibitions Hito Steyerl: This is the future and Haegue Yang: Emergence. She was the Curatorial Research Associate at the Art Gallery of York University, for the production of Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca’s film RISE (2018). While working at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre, she co-curated with Peta Rake, Nicole Kelly Westman’s exhibition Rose, Dear (2016). In 2019, she curated and commissioned two new works from Westman for the group exhibition On Pause presented at York University’s Gales Gallery as part of her master’s degree in Art History.