About

Canadian cultural practitioners create new knowledge and bodies of work through their practices; yet have difficulty finding opportunities to share their work with larger or new communities, expanding their reach. Canada produces excellent artists  who contribute to this knowledge and thinking around contemporary socio-political, philosophical, poetic, environmental, and  economic topics.

Searching for a place to share and discuss their works and processes, artists are seeking audiences that reach  across disciplinary boundaries (eg. science, medicine, environmental, social sciences, general public). archiveThing is  positioned as a new public commons for artists, creative practitioners – and for national and international audiences.  

Opportunities in galleries, museums and publications, pre-COVID19, were already highly competitive and few. As well, most galleries program exhibitions though curatorial teams. We seek to create new opportunities for a wide array of practitioners such as artists: from a variety of communities; with no gallery representation; who make work that sits outside of  commercial interests or doesn’t match the curatorial trends; who live outside of Canada’s large urban centres (and have little access to gallery directors and curators).  

archiveThing - as a project and a platform, hopes to address this gap for artists seeking to share work, connect with other makers, researchers and new  audiences.

This digital platform uses an artist-focused metadata schema to capture the complexity of contemporary cultural practices. Our schema focuses on narrative structures to describe the  complexities of art & design and curatorial practices. Artists here describe the making, processes, mistakes, sketches, iterations, project impetus, conditions of making, performative aspects, and related influences and references, etc. These types of information are often revealed in the less  formal ‘studio visit’ – where stories emerge, tangential works are shown, relationships between ideas and material realities can  emerge fluidly through conversation. 

This artist-focused platform and metadata schema then becomes a place to share, make discoverable, connect, relate, network,  research, and communicate across disciplines and communities.  The stories, descriptions and narratives around each work is written and contributed by the maker in their own voices. This archive grows from the contributions by artists and practitioners.

Our public -facing retrieval interface allows site visitors and researchers to search, explore, visualize dynamic connections within, between and across  artists’ projects and practices through a tagging system selected by the artists for each of their works - making many rich aspects of their work discoverable from multiple points and connections.