Patel brown Gallery | 21 Wade Ave
Adapt and pivot
June 25 - august 8, 2020
Shary Boyle, Vanessa Brown, Nicholas Galanin, Alexa Hatanaka, Anique Jordan, Rajni Perera, Nep Sidhu, Howie Tsui, & Naama Tsabar
The inaugural exhibition at Patel Brown is, in itself, a statement of the gallery’s vision: that art is a living history, a prominent marker of moments — and in 2020, there has already been much to mark.
Initially conceived in February 2020, the exhibition title, Adapt and Pivot, was chosen to embody key tenets of the new gallery’s mission, programming and attitude: declaring a commitment to continued learning, authentic community engagement, and to support growth through the respectful and expansive exchange of diverse viewpoints.
When the global health crisis first emerged, Adapt and Pivot seemed to take on new meaning. With stay-at-home orders, many found themselves looking inward to better digest and understand what was happening in the world. In June 2020, with growing awareness around ongoing injustices to the Black community it is now more apparent than ever that our collective gaze, thoughts, and energy must be directed outward to create change. This meditative movement from inner contemplation to outer action is a shift that symbolizes awareness and the will to change for the better – to adapt and pivot.
With the fundamental belief that art can disarm, open, and expand our perspectives, we developed an exhibition to honour the very human capacity to evolve with artists who embrace moments of transformation. Adaptation, in this exhibition, can be seen in various ways: in material explorations, embedded narratives of resilience, and undoubtedly in the each artist’s unique, unwavering commitment to create.
The exhibition, Adapt and Pivot, can be seen as a call to action: Adapt! Pivot!
Discouraging passivity, Adapt and Pivot asks us all what we are adapting towards and from, and to digest urgency into sustained change. When everything feels vaguely survivalist in scope, we find ourselves presented with the opportunity to decide what to keep and what to leave behind. Today we ask: What tools do we have in our arsenal to build something better? What materials best suit our new realities? And, most importantly, what needs to be stripped away completely to make room for renewal?
Adapt and Pivot puts forward an abstract response to the salient question ‘What comes next?’ Its reply is a refraction, with even more questions and necessarily varied perspectives: How will society reorganize to suit ever-changing social and economic realities? How will our bodies adapt to a climate and government at odds with our basic needs? What will we create for armour and/or ornament? Will traditions and rites of passage be upheld or must new ones be forged? Whatever answers are yielded, and whatever their processes might entail, we all find ourselves at the beginning of something new.
To Adapt and Pivot requires bringing together diverging perspectives, a spirit of openness and forward movement. From a distance, artworks may appear too different to connect, but they come together to create a tableau of objects and narratives that hint at and prepare us for new futures to consider and step into. Artworks in Adapt and Pivot are not answers to the aforementioned questions, but vehicles by which we might traverse our ever-changing realities towards more imaginative and caring ones. Or, viewed another way, this exhibition does not propose the solution — it offers instead a loose thread for pulling, unraveling, and remaking.