Tatum Dooley
Curator-in-Residence
July – October, 2025
A “walk” to trace traces:
Noticing in the minor key of the downwrong
Shannon Garden-Smith and Laila Fox
September 28, 2025
Art Run / Walk Club
August 17, 2025
1:1 Curator Walks
July 2–31, 2025
Ground Truths
The art world is usually invested in stillness: the quiet of an art gallery, the slow walk through a museum, sitting in front of a favourite piece of art. Tatum Dooley is interested in investigating movement in the art world. From July to October, during a Curatorial Residency at NAMARA | projects, Dooley will engage in research and inquiries into artists who use walking as a pillar in their art practices.
Sand, birdsong, tree bark, stone. These elements are collaborators in practices of frottage, field recordings, and site-specific interventions. The residency will directly engage with artists using components of walking and nature within their practices. Research topics will span from the dérives of the Situationists to the mappings of contemporary land art, including a close look at contemporary artists Shannon Garden-Smith and Iris Häussler.
Fittingly, this residency will take place outside of the regular confines of the white cube and into the world. The residency will ask: How can walking be an artistic and ecological methodology that reflects the places where art is made and shown? Can a walking practice push against the rules and expectations of the contemporary art market? Who has access to certain spaces in the city? And how is that access reflected within the walls of the art world?
PUBLIC PROGRAMMING
A “walk” to trace traces: Noticing in the minor key of the downwrong
When: Sunday, September 28, 3 – 5 PM
Rain date: Sunday, October 5, 3 – 5 PM
Meeting Point: North-most entrance to the Philosopher’s Walk, Bloor St W
Join us: RSVP
I have known some granite types, we all do: characters of stone, upright, immovable, unchangeable, opinions the general size, shape and pliability of the Rocky Mountains….That’s fine, that’s admirable, but it has nothing to do with me. Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, or downwrong.
– Ursula K. LeGuin, “Being Taken for Granite”
Facilitated by Shannon Garden-Smith and Laila Fox.
Join artists Shannon Garden-Smith and Laila Fox for a gradual, collective “walk” or “movement” through the city. The route is loosely guided by several anchor points: public un-monuments in the form of prints in urban surfaces (for example, sidewalk concrete and road paint). The prints, traces of human, and more-than-human-animal, plant, and machine contact with the city, offer a minor disruption, a tender depression that might allow us to hold something other than the progress narratives and settler colonial logics of our paved-over urban and suburban worlds.
We will seek to attune our attention, our noticing, differently, so that we might begin to sense differently. Disrupting what is ordinarily knowable in urban space, we will attend to what beings, forces, and histories are affirmed/effaced by the shape our relations take in the concrete-bounded environment. The facilitators will share various stories and material lines of inquiry while inviting participants into exercises such as the creation of rubbings, tracings, and clay impressions that will allow us to deepen our pause and sensorial attunement.
Participants of all abilities and skill levels, including those who use mobility devices, are welcome.
Please note: The activity will conclude near Spadina Station. While we will move gently and plan for rest throughout, we recommend bringing water and dressing comfortably for the weather. Duration is approximately 2 hours.
Join us: RSVP
Facilitator Bios
Shannon Garden-Smith is an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto of Scottish and Irish settler heritage. Garden-Smith is currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Art at York University, having previously earned an MFA at the University of Guelph and Honours BA at the University of Toronto. Primarily working across sculpture and installation, Garden-Smith engages with the mutability and poetics of the lithic environment. She seeks to unsettle naturalized relationships to its extraction, drawing on sand and stone’s ability to hold complex possibilities for time, memory, and different futures.
Laila Fox is interested in how invisibility defines urban ecologies. Working across text and visual arts, she considers how what is knowable/believable/noticeable challenges and shapes relations between (more-than-)humans in colonized places. Fox lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and has been informed by the unceded lands and waters of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (aka Vancouver), and where ‘the spawning stream’ meets the shore of the global petrochemical industry (aka Sarnia/Chemical Valley).
PREVIOUS PROGRAMMING
August 17: Art Run / Walk Club
A casual movement journey through downtown Toronto exploring how we interact with art in the city.
Program concluded at the Toronto Music Garden with a movement and stretch session led by artist sarah koekkoek.
July 2 – 31: Curator Walk
To launch the residency, Tatum invited members of the public to book a time to walk together around downtown Toronto and discuss their experience either in the art world or walking.
CURATOR
Tatum Dooley (tatumdooley.com) is a writer and founder of Art Forecast. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Architectural Digest, Border Crossings, Canadian Art, Garage Magazine, the Globe & Mail, The Walrus, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Toronto Star, and Vogue. She has written exhibition texts for artists worldwide.
Tatum has a BA in Arts & Contemporary Studies and an MA in Literature of Modernity from Toronto Metropolitan University. She currently sits on the Curatorial Committee of SNAP, a photography auction in support of AIDS Committee of Toronto. Previously, she was Co-Chair of Salon 44, Gallery 44’s annual fundraiser.