Ew

Three years and no updates?

Ew.

And the links to my photos and videos are broken and what's here looks like total crap???

Ewwwwwwww.

At least twitter.com/shecurates has a pretty good log of what I've been up to.

Life gets bumpy. The last post was saying goodbye to my brother when he left for a tour of duty in Afghanistan. The blog wasn't a priority at all after that. I wanted to post some back and forths of Sylvester Stallone videos we shared with each other while he was away, but that was short lived. Not all ideas work out, and for too long I've let that stop me from accomplishing anything at all. Anyway. He's living it up in Australia working on an apple farm and practicing Muay Thai, so back to the blog I go. To tie up the loose ends. I have been really feeling that lately - the need to tie up loose ends. Pay back my debts. Find some freedom from my worries.

This blog maybe will become a priority again (how many times have I said that) if I want a proper professional internet presence, to be leveraged into some kind of career building tool..? Right?? That's motivation, isn't it? Ha, maybe I should be switching over to Tumblr. The point is, GET OUT THERE BE SEEN DON'T LET ANYONE FORGET ABOUT YOU AND EVERYTHING WILL BE JUST SUPER AWESOME.

Ehhhhh. I resent that. Motivated because of what it may do for my career. I mean, "I'd rather not" and all that. But then, the fear of failure gets the anxiety churning. So do I do this for myself? Purely because I need to share my ideas, read over them, see how they develop. I love Montaigne's dissatisfaction with writing essays - keeping them by his bed, making changes in the margins, never being finished, the idea always incomplete - open to being something more. Either I'll develop a real affection for putting my uncertain words online, and get comfortable with publicly sharing my discomfort, or I'll pull the classic anxiety move and avoid this for another three years.

A friend, Timothy Comeau, talked me into not deleting this thing. Keep it for internet posterity. A record for those who may go looking for me or my words one day. So here it stands, in all its cringey glory. Thanks a lot, Timothy. Thanks a lot, Robyn, too, for stealing my phone and forcing me to focus on doing this instead of distracting myself further into oblivion.

Blahh blah blah. I never liked keeping a journal. But the thing is this: more and more I miss my grandparents, and genuinely and painfully long for them to be here again. And more and more I wish they had left something like this behind. So, as I tried to use this to be closer to my brother, here I am now, trying to get close to something again. There's the motivation.

Some career-related highlights from the last three years:

Becoming Education Officer at Oakville Galleries in 2012

Co-founding the Curators' Network Canada with Katherine Dennis and Earl Miller in 2013

Performing Art Manners for Practice Practice at Nuit Blanche in 2013, curated by Alice Dixon

Selling my zines, Swoon Saloon and Pussy Power, and gilded lily incense burners at the Xpace Zine Fair in 2013

Doing Face Painting by Artists at the Design Exchange with Sarah Febbraro, at Emily Gove's invitation

Curating Melina Sevilla's Piñatas for Nuit Blanche as part of Out of Site, curated by Earl Miller for the Queen West BIA in 2014

Going to Stronger than Stone: (Re)inventing the Indigenous Monument through a bursary from the Canadian Museums Association and support from Oakville Galleries in 2014

Joining the Akin Collective in 2015

Reviving my blog from the dead in 2015

That wasn't so bad after all

xo