MLitt Curatorial Practice School of Fine Art
Deirdre McIntosh
Deirdre McIntosh is an artist-curator from Toronto whose practice draws from a slow curating methodology and embraces communal experiences. Her current research centres on looping, both in the physical sense through repetitive gestures and as a broader curatorial strategy. Looping gestures toward alternative temporalities, reflecting the flow of circular and slow time, resisting the pressure toward accelerated, linear progress, and instead making space for return and slow transformation over time.
Deirdre has curated exhibitions at the Ada Slaight Gallery, Youthful Vengeance, the CN Tower, and the Glasgow School of Art. She holds a BFA in Drawing & Painting from OCAD University and has recently completed a Master’s in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) at The Glasgow School of Art. In addition to her curatorial work, Deirdre has recently started her own communal stitching group, In The Loop, which aims to create a community centred around slow making.
sooperdooperlooper
sooperdooperlooper explores the unexpected intersection between crochet, knitting, and electronic music, practices rooted in looped structures. It draws on the shared language of both forms and their emphasis on collective rhythm. These practices embrace the loop, a return that is never exactly the same. Looping gestures toward alternative temporalities, reflecting the flow of circular and slow time. In a culture driven by acceleration, productivity, and linear progress, the loop becomes a radical form that allows for building meaning over time and returning.
This exhibition features Who sets the ground rules?, chalk marker, by Blake Ballard; MEMORPHOSIS, sewing threads and heat-reactive yarn on Dubied knitting machine, by Kim Lambert; the wind turbine at Cathkin Braes is alone on a hill singing for No One, sound recording, by joshua elza breen-tucci, Phase Transition, Silt Memory, and Vacillator, modular synth/ASM Hydrasynth, by Rory Green, tricklebaby_green, impossible light, crudely drawn, and 2022, as if in waking dream, by maia harding
Instructions for Curating a Transnational Exhibition
Curated by Nina Ankisetty (Toronto) and Deirdre McIntosh (Glasgow)
Instructions for Curating a Transnational Exhibition unfolded simultaneously in Toronto and Glasgow. Two curators, one in each city, have formulated and exchanged instructions to (mis)guide the other’s curatorial process.
instructions for curation by Nina Ankisetty (exhibited in Glasgow)
– blend into the surroundings
– find a work that looks like a song
– display words/text as art
– force the viewer into and odd position to view the work
– site specific/toronto related
– texture
– something that would taste good
– utopia // distopia
– poetry in an artwork
– pair two works that wouldn’t usually go together
instructions for curating a show by Deirdre McIntosh (exhibited in Toronto)
– create an unexpected conversation
– seek warmth
– leave a mark
– find a work that reminds you of what it feels like to be in a dream
– red
– frame something
– use too many or not enough nails to hang something
– generate noise
– hang something for poppy
– question every move you made
