My Curatorial Practice

I came to curation sideways.

I started as a photographer and filmmaker who kept ending up in rooms where the work had to be arranged, lit, and explained to people who had walked in off the street, and somewhere between a small Toronto gallery in 2017 and the grounds of Art Basel Miami in 2021, the arranging (read: storytelling) became the part I cared about most.

Here is the idea everything else hangs off: artists are worldbuilders. Every serious artist is making a world with its own physics, its own manners, and its own weather, and a single work is a window into it. What a curator does, or at least what I try to do, is put those windows next to each other so you can see from one world into another: the artists' worlds into ours and into each other's, creating meaningful interplay. Sometimes the worlds agree and the pairing hums. Sometimes they argue, and the argument is the show. A photograph from one decade and a 3D sculpture from last month can do exactly the same conceptual work, and when you juxtapose them, that becomes obvious in a way no wall text could make it. The rule I hold myself to is that the pairing has to open up a meaningful conversation without bending either artist's intent. If I have to misread a work to make it fit, it does not belong in the room.

Second idea, and the one people most associate with me: mixed reality. The phrase gets thrown around a lot, so let me be plain about what I mean. Mixed reality (XR) is, put simply, one reality superimposed on another. The Apple Vision Pro is true mixed reality, as you can see the real world and digital experiences superimposed on that world simultaneously. But "XR" also encompasses the current stages of AR, VR, and beyond, and across those realms there is a lot of room for innovation. That can be a digital sculpture standing on the grounds of an art fair that you can only see through your phone, which is what we did at Art Basel. It can be a gallery with four floors and no gravity, built inside a virtual world, which is what the Cash Labs Gallery was in Decentraland. It can be a mirror that dresses you in a garment that does not exist, in a building on Broadway, which is what INTER was. In every case, the question is the same: what happens to the work, and to the person looking at it, when two realities share a space? That overlap is where I like to work, because nobody has settled its conventions yet.

Third: the visual and spatial experience comes first. I want you to feel the relationship between two works and the space they sit in before you read a word. So the text in my shows is short on purpose, more like short scripts with staging notes than traditional wall texts. It teases the connection, it may start an argument, and then it gets out of the way. People sometimes assume immersion means projection, headsets, and a fog machine. It can. It can also be a Rothko in a quiet room. My theatrical upbringing informs the gravitas a work of art holds when you behold it. As actors, we learned to "use" our space on stage to our advantage, to tell the story and live our character as best we could. In film, when I worked as a director, we discussed how much information we can portray visually without a word being said. When I art directed music videos and commercials, most of the job was building the world of the show or creative vision, practically. These references inform my love of immersive experiences and art. I see great value in creating immersive experiences that people want to spend time in and dig deeper into, bring their friends, bring their grandparents, come back a third time, and ask to throw a party there. Immersion is a property of attention. And great art can win attention.

Fourth: the gathering changes the work. If you scream in a field, no one cares; if you scream on stage at the Wintergreen Theatre in a bright spotlight, you're a performer. The same action becomes something else depending on where you are, who is there, what they expect, and how they have been invited to look or take part. So I think about the audience as a material. Who is in the room on opening night, what they wore, whether they are allowed to touch anything. A show that opens to collectors at six and to the public at nine is two different shows, and I would rather design both than pretend they are the same.

Fifth brings me to the entrance. The entranceway is a performance in and of itself: the threshold, the queue, the moment the door opens and the social rules change. My favourite case study for this is AREA, the New York club of the early 1980s that rebuilt itself around a new theme every few weeks and treated the walk-in as part of the show. I would put Warhol's Factory, Visionaire, Fiorucci's stores, David LaChapelle's built worlds, and the design and subculture of Berghain on the same shelf: places where art, nightlife, fashion, and gathering stopped being separate categories. None of them can be reproduced, and I would not try (that was theirs). What they knew still holds: anticipation is a medium, and the door is the first room.

Three more things I keep coming back to, because so much of my curating has happened on screens, in headsets, and on chains.

Sixth: Code as art. A good deal of what I have hung, in rooms with and without gravity, was written before it was made: a sculpture that is a few thousand lines of instructions, a portrait a model assembled from a prompt and a photographer's archive, a poem that revises itself while you read it. People ask me whether that counts. I think the question is older than it sounds. A score is a set of instructions, and the symphony is what happens when someone follows them. A Sol LeWitt wall drawing is a page of rules and a crew with pencils. Generative and AI art sit in that lineage, with one real difference: the instructions can now surprise their author. So when I show this work, I try to put the intent next to the result, the prompt beside the image, the seed beside the bloom, so you can see the gap between what was asked for and what arrived. That gap is where the artist lives. The tools are new. Taste, editing, and the nerve to throw out nine hundred outputs to keep one are the oldest skills in the building.

Seventh: Ownership. My master's thesis, written in Florence in 2021, was about NFTs, and I have spent the years since curating work that lives on a blockchain, so I will say this plainly: most of what the world learned about NFTs in 2021 was about prices, and almost none of it was about art. What interested me then, and still does, is the receipt. For the first time, a digital work could carry a public record of who made it, who has owned it, and what the artist is owed each time it changes hands. That is a quiet revolution for anyone who has watched a photographer's work get screenshotted into oblivion. It also changes what a show is. A collector in Singapore and one in Toronto can own neighbouring works and meet in the same virtual room on opening night. An exhibition can be a drop, a drop can be an exhibition, and the wall label can be a contract. The market cooled, and I will not mourn the part of it that was only a market. The infrastructure stayed, and I expect the next decade of art ownership, the physical kind included, to borrow from it: provenance you can check, artist royalties written into the work itself, and a collection you can carry with you into any room, real or rendered.

Lucky number eight: Fashion, and the reality spectrum. I came up through fashion, and fashion has always been the art form most at ease living on a body and on a screen at the same time. So a lot of my curating sits on what I call the reality spectrum. At one end, a physical garment on a physical person in a physical room. At the other, a dress that exists only as a file, worn by an avatar in a game. Everything in between is fair game. Fashion art, where a garment is made first to be looked at. Wearable technology, like CuteCircuit's illuminated garments, which we put in the Vogue Closet in Singapore. Digital fashion, which I curated onto the runways of the first Metaverse Fashion Week. Augmented reality fashion, a mirror on Broadway dressing you in something that is not there. Mixed reality, where the same look is shown on a mannequin and in a headset in the same room. And fashion in gaming, where dressing an avatar is a daily habit for a generation that may never sit at a runway show, and where a skin can mean more to someone than a jacket. My job on that spectrum is the same job as anywhere else: find the two points that have something to say to each other and put them side by side. A hologram runway beside a hand-sewn gown tells you something about craft that neither does alone. The future of fashion, as far as I can tell, is the whole spectrum lit at once.

Last: I am an optimist, and I am drawn to exhibitions that can change while they are open. A show in a virtual world can be edited on a Tuesday because of what happened on Monday. A physical show can hand part of its program to the people who turn up. I like work that challenges institutions, and I like it most when the challenge comes with a proposal for something better. Studio Drift, Andrés Reisinger, Sasha Stiles, Operator, Beeple, and ARTECHOUSE are all, in different ways, building toward a more hopeful version of the future than the one we are told to expect, and that is the company I want to continue to keep.

What does this add up to? Well, a practice that puts worlds next to each other, that treats the room (physical, virtual, or both at once) as part of the work, that trusts your eyes before your reading glasses, and that counts the people in the room as collaborators.

If you run an institution, a platform, or a brand, and you have a space that could hold two realities at the same time, I would like to talk.