Kick off 2026 with us at WWG with the opening reception for ‘Untitled Portals, Variations’ by Laura Kay Keeling (Hamilton, ON) on Friday, January 16, 2026, from 7 to 9 pm. The artist will be on site for this exceptional start to the new year!
‘Untitled Portals, Variations’ presents a series of collages, an installation piece, and a virtual space by multidisciplinary artist Laura Kay Keeling. Through a process-centred approach, the artist experiments with and merges analog and digital processes to expand on an earlier series, ‘Untitled Portals’.
These pieces incorporate natural elements that have been photographed both digitally and on 35mm film, scanned using a flatbed scanner and a 3D scanner, digitally manipulated, and then brought into physical form. Continuing a dialogue between the natural and digital world, the work explores connections to where we find ourselves, the incredible and important ecosystems that surround us, and the joys that can come from everyday moments of being in and engaging with our surroundings through reciprocal care and respect.
How can we maintain and evolve connections to the natural world in an increasingly isolating and technology-dependent society?
Can virtual spaces be used to encourage folks to take pause and explore, and can moments of joy and excitement be replicated in these virtual environments?
Laura Kay Keeling (she/her/they) is a self-taught visual artist based in Hamilton, ON. Her practice is rooted in a process-centred approach that integrates analog photography, video, digital collage, installation, and public artwork. As a process-based artist with archival investigations, her artwork questions how we form connections with the natural world and how we capture and cherish memories and moments in time. She explores the reciprocity of care amongst natural narratives and how one might engage and interact with humans, plants, animals, and nature in the context of care-based relations. Alongside her studio practice, Laura is an active arts administrator.
Relational upkeep is at the core of artist-run culture
This month, White Water Gallery staff, Board members, and volunteers have undertaken the significant project of organizing and archiving the gallery’s substantial records, programming and reference materials, equipment, and more, currently being held in storage, some of which has been held static in boxes lo these past 50+ years, since WWG’s inception in 1974. Former Executive Director clayton windatt is among those assisting to create a new world order for the gallery’s holdings, and was inspired during the process of the project to write the following essay detailing this duty of care.
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In an arts economy perpetually defined by precarious contracts, chronic underfunding, and systemic burnout, the most radical and essential artistic labor might not be the visible masterpiece, but the invisible act of mutual aid. This hidden work forms bonds through relationships stronger than funding or mandates and is the reason why artist-run centres survive to this day.
As artists and friends, we explore intentional maintenance of peer-to-peer relationships and how they function as essential, often uncredited, forms of labor, one that directly challenges financial precarity within the cultural sector. Relational upkeep is far more than simply networking; it is the building of collective, sustainable infrastructures between people and places directly connecting the historical fight for artist rights in Canada where contemporary practices prioritize collective infrastructure over individual output, thereby validating relational work as legitimate artistic output. To a degree, this is more part of the artist-run movement than the exhibitions that have taken place as I exemplify “process” and that exhibitions are “outcome”.
Exhibitions act as models of commitment, directly echoing mandates centering engaging with the “wicked problem” of labor inequality and systemic burnout in the arts sector.
Wicked problems, a term first coined in the field of social planning, refers to complex social or cultural problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements. In the context of the arts, issues like chronic undercompensation, the lack of accessible arts funding, the reliance on unpaid emotional labor, and the cyclical nature of artist burnout are not isolated incidents but intertwined facets of a single “wicked problem” that resists simple fixes. It is this systemic, tangled nature of precarity that necessitates the kind of multi-faceted, relational solutions found within the a framework of care, where the solution is not a single policy change, but a continuous, collective, and evolving process of mutual relational upkeep.
The impulse to build self-determined infrastructures within artist-run centres is not new; it is deeply embedded in the history of Canadian cultural practice drawing directly from the pivotal moments of the 1970s ARC movement. Collective responses to institutional neglect served as a rally call to artists forming shared values and collaborative action towards productions, exhibitions, and discourses outside of commercial pressures or restrictive public galleries. The ARC movement is characterized by the fierce advocacy of that time that supported the formation and formalization of fee standards, a relentless, often fraught, struggle to have artistic practice recognized not just as a cultural gift, but as a profession deserving fair compensation for the labour of art ending with the 1988 Exhibition Right amendment to the Copyright Act.
When institutions fail, artists must organize, advocate, and build their own supports for survival.
In the present moment, the battleground has shifted from the institutional boardroom to the digital collective and the community gathering. The ARC ethos materializes the administrative and social structures required to sustain a practice, not primarily through its exhibition schedule, but through the documentation and performance of its maintenance.
Focusing on the daily life of the ARC; a practice that employs documentary, social practice, and digital media to visualize the emotional and organizational investment necessary for genuine community building. ARC documentations often include images of artists cleaning the gallery space, not as a background activity, but as the primary subject of a discussion on labor value. The gallery actually must be cleaned and someone has to do it.
Today, this principle extends to the use of digital spaces often more than physical ones as digital platforms such as discord are built by collectives for shared systems of resource management, scheduling or information sharing. These resources are presented less like software and more like embodied promises of shared resources, where administrative time is elevated to the level of high conceptual craft through mutual care and respect. These practices shift the focus from a singular, finished object to the relational process itself, challenging the sector to consider how the time, resources, and emotional investment necessary can exist if we are to maintain any truly resilient and ethical practices without exploiting the labour of friends and family.
All the paperwork, the sweeping, the scheduling, the emotional check-ins, and the collective negotiation are art. The concept of care is a vital contemporary iteration of the perennial fight for artist rights validating relational upkeep, visible through the shared labor of maintenance and administration, as essential artistic labor, we honor the legacy of Canadian arts advocacy while offering ongoing and powerful messages towards the future.
In an era demanding sustainability, transparency, and equity, collective maintenance of peer relationships is the most resilient resource available. Our work offers a powerful counter-narrative to the isolating pressures of the cultural economy, proving that the most sustainable art practices are ones built not just on individual ego, but on collective commitment. For the next generation of artists, the pathway to professional survival and artistic freedom will be paved, collaboratively, by hand and by artist-run centres.
clayton windatt is a curator, multi-arts performer and filmmaker living and working in Ontario. As the former Executive Director of the White Water Gallery, Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and current Executive Director of the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference, Clayton has an extensive history working in Artist-Run Culture and Community Arts. Clayton maintains contracts with various governments, colleges and non-government organizations as a writer, consultant and knowledge broker negotiating between peoples, places and communities. Clayton works in/with community, design, communications, curation, performance, theatre, technology, and consulting, and is a very active artist.
