MUSEUM IN WATER (ICED)
Exhibition
Public
Curators: Pam Patterson & Grace MacDonald
113 McCaul St.
113 McCaul St.
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MUSEUM IN WATER (ICED)
Paola Poletto
January 27- April 15, 2026
Curators: Pam Patterson & Grace MacDonald
113 Research
113 McCaul St., 5 floor
Image: Museum in Water (Iced): “Escape” (2026) available in variable sizes, digital colour photo, by Paola Poletto.
In MUSEUM IN WATER (ICED), photographs “glitch” the landscape as a liberatory gesture. Using vignettes drawn from her 12-year experience as an artist-worker in one of Canada’s leading contemporary art museums, Poletto explores and extends the perceptions she has gained by pairing images from two sites—one site embodies her as practicing artist, and the other as museum worker. Each is respectively represented by her use of Toronto’s civic reflecting pool at Mel Lastman Square located near her home, and by her reimagining AGO’s Walker Court as a “professional” reflective pool.
For over four years, using photography as creative and critical strategy, she has generated multi-perspectival readings of sites or events as a means to de-centralize her gaze and to expose power structures. The intention has been to "destabilize" the viewer's gaze in a meaningful way. Glitches, black surfaces of digital non-computes, become places of “opportunity”, and blurry fragments represent sites of "movement and change”. Each of her compositions is unique in size and scale, determined by her relationship and collaboration with the camera and its mechanics. Equally composed by chance, intuition, and a computational back and forth between human and machine, the painterly installation is, for her, an extension of a contemplative exercise focusing on the collective “we”.
Paola Poletto is an artist and arts professional based in Toronto, Canada. She is interested in multi-voiced creative narratives and is currently pursuing practice-based doctoral research in Media and Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University. She aims to make a new museum experience map focused on artist-worker perspectives through an auto-theory lens. Poletto is also the independent co-producer of art/lit projects including OOL (Office of Life), an imprint she started in 2019.
Poletto gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council/Government of Ontario for exhibition assistance funding.
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