A year into her role as Curator of Contemporay Art at the Ottawa Art Gallery, Andrea Fatona has championed a three-year program that aims to significantly expand the Gallery's community presence and, on a higher level, reconsider the intimate bond between contemporary art and society.

In the thick of a diverse curatorial and teaching career based in major centres such as Toronto and Vancouver, life changes brought Fatona to Ottawa in the middle of 2008. Then, almost as if it were fated, the position at OAG became available—and Fatona seemed to be a perfect fit, mostly because she was so different.

After a relatively quiet first year on the job, Fatona is developing a program that draws on her desire to incorporate a broader range of voices into the conversation we call contemporary art. Fatona's suberbly curated Fibred Optics show now on exhibit at the OAG offers a wonderful example of what we might expect in the coming years.

As a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, Fatona examines the complexity of culture, including cultural production, representation, circulation and mediation. She is also a contributing editor to Toronto's FUSE Magazine.



What are your prevailing impressions at this point of the Ottawa Art Gallery and the Ottawa fine arts scene in general?

It has been a pleasure to work at the Ottawa Art gallery over the past year and I am looking forward with great excitement to the coming years. The Ottawa Art Gallery has a fairly young and dynamic staff and its audience ranges from the very young to seniors. The Gallery, like other local cultural institutions, holds a unique position vis-à-vis national cultural institutions in the city. It is overshadowed by national institutions like the National Art Gallery and the National Arts Centre. However, I see OAG as a very important institution that serves regional needs and connects the local with the national and international. We serve a very important role in the ecology of art organizations.

You have just completed a proposal document that maps out your vision for OAG programming over the next three years. Can you provide an executive summary of that vision?

My vision for the coming three years is to see the Ottawa Art Gallery engage with communities who do not normally interact with us. The focus is on fostering engagements with artists and audiences from diverse cultural communities; illuminating and illustrating the developmental trajectories of contemporary artists by creating linkages between works created by artists at different yet important stages of their careers; developing interdisciplinary discourses and dialogue on contemporary art; and developing collaborations between the Gallery and other institutions and organizations.

You have a funny novelty product in your office called "Surreal Peppermint Flavor" breath spray, promising to help you "Understand Modern Art Instantly" ... it reminded me of a quote I came across recently from Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker: "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." To what extent do you think contemporary art is of interest only to a shrinking audience of specialized viewers?

Contemporary art can be and is of interest to a wide and diverse audience. It is my belief that as presenters of contemporary art and shapers of culture we have to be aware of what is of interest to viewers and use that as our starting point. We need to diversify the spaces and places in which contemporary art is made available. The urban core is where access to contemporary art is concentrated and the majority of the population now lives in suburban spaces. We need to create bridges to those communities and potential audiences by initiating conversations, visiting their spaces, and by inviting them into ours.

Do you have any specific plans on this front?

I am working on a few ideas at the moment. One of the things I can tell is that OAG is planning to work with an audience development consultant to assist us in developing strategies to engage with potential audiences like those who reside in suburban areas.

You also intend to develop OAG programming that represents and encourages minority communities not highly visible in galleries historically. What are some specifics here? To what extent is this spurred/informed by your own ethnic ancestry?

I am very interested in the ways in which we articulate Canada as a settler society and multicultural nation through the presentation of visual artworks. To this end, OAG continues to ‘integrate’ the works of Aboriginal artists and artists from racialized and linguistically minoritized communities into its exhibition and public programs. The current exhibition, Fibred Optics, does exactly that. It features the works of artists from the Francophone, Black, Asian, and gay communities. Over the next three years OAG will also present works by Dipna Horra, Eric Chan, Marie Josée Laframboise, Wally Dion as well as animate a community arts project.

My parents are Nigerian and Jamaican and I was born in England. I feel that I embody the concept of hybridity and this gives me a unique location from which to perceive and act in the world. It is undeniable that my own background as a person of African descent makes me keenly aware of issues of marginality and representation, but more importantly, I think that living in Canada has made me even more aware of the fact that we can create spaces in which we can all participate in framing and expressing who we are as Canadians. I think this is very exciting.







Most of your career in the art world was centred in Vancouver and Toronto. How has the Ottawa scene differed from those larger places?

I lived in Vancouver from the late 1980s to the mid 90s and worked within the artist-run centre milieu at Artspeak Gallery and at Video In. I moved back to Peterborough in 1995 to work at Artspace Gallery and then moved on to work on a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. My move to Ottawa was based on personal reasons. Ottawa has proved to be a very productive place for me so far as it has enabled me to understand my dissertation project in ways that were unavailable to me before. My work focuses on the management of national culture and I am able to experience it as it is operationalized here.

The scene here is so much gentler than Toronto’s and there seems to be less posturing and competition than there is in other centres.

What theories do you have to explain a gentler Ottawa?

I think there is less posturing here because the community of artists is fairly small, less transient and interconnected. Although Ottawa is the capital city it is not an economic hub in the way centres such as Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto are and this may also influence how local artists position themselves.

To what extent do you think Ottawa's municipal role as "manager of national culture" has restricted development of local artists and cultural programs?

This a good question and I am trying to figure it out. What I have observed in my short time here is that local artists and cultural activities are overshadowed by the national yet at the same time there is an inordinate amount of activities that take place at the local level. In a way, it’s about the need for more visibility of the activities that take place at the local level and perhaps a need for a more expansive vision of art and culture at the municipal level.

Why did you include that particular piece of artwork when posing for our photographer?

I chose the work of Gatineau artist Michèle Provost as she is the local artist in the group exhibition Fibred Optics that is currently on display at the Ottawa Art Gallery. The piece of art I am holding is one of the works that comprise Provost’s installation called ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉS. I find her work and this work in particular very compelling and strong as it deals with the economies of art and the ways in which reception is shaped by curators, writers and critics.