Interview with Michèle Pearson Clarke about We Buy Gold exhibit for the AGO
With the launch of the We Buy Gold website, the AGO has released an interview with Artist-in-Residence Michèle Pearson Clarke about her experience curating the exhibition!
Here’s a sneak peek of the interview:
“AGOinsider: Can you share some of your process for bringing the exhibition together? Did you start by crafting a theme or by selecting the artists you wanted to include?
Clarke: The exhibition was my proposal for an artist residency at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, so to start, I knew that it would need to address LGBTQ issues. It was also an opportunity to explicitly incorporate my Photo Laureate role into my personal practice, which meant a focus on photography. And since this is my first time curating an exhibition, working with primarily emerging artists had a nice synergistic feel. As an artist myself, I then zeroed in on finding work that I loved and work that was interested in the photographic gesture along with the photograph itself, as I am. But the conversations I had with each of the selected artists also ultimately helped to frame the final exhibition.”