Paola Poletto

Biography

Paola Poletto has enjoyed a dual career as an artist and arts professional in leadership, curatorial and museum education roles. Social practice and process focused; site-specific and durational, her work includes photography, drawing, sculpture, writing and creative collaboration with a focus on the ethics of responsibility, sustainability and transformation within the museum, learning and civic engagement fields. Paola recently undertook a residency at Arquetopia Foundation in Puebla, Mexico to begin to develop this new body of work, and it will be on view at OACDU’s 113 Research Project Gallery in early 2026. She is pursuing a doctorate at TMU’s Media and Design Innovation Program. 

Residency Goals

The Summer Studio Program will allow me to make/hang/test a large photographic work  and group critique an extended approach that includes print on canvas so that I may weave into its surface – disrupting the image beyond the technological glitches – where strings are both a meditation and an excitable image energy.

Residency project

My photo-based work is an exploration and representation of concerns and ambitions that draw from my experience as an artist-worker in the museum. This project directly contributes to my final dissertation that aims to map a transformational museum experience from the perspectives of museum leadership and recent scholarship, as well as the artist-worker. My photographs are informed by labour movements, photo therapy methods inspired by Jo Spence and other feminist collectives, and photopoetry. I “walk my panoramic” to begin to compose my photographs, forcing a multi-perspective form of looking upon a site and a means to both de-centralize my gaze within it, the power structures within which I move, whether art world broadly speaking, museum, residency, domestic space or other, and to "destabilize" in a meaningful way.