Season 10: Curator Lucy Cotter
Turnstones

Turnstones
2020-2021

Turnstones catalog available here.

If the artists presented in the next curatorial season have anything in common, it is their refusal of the available vocabulary, and the narrowing down that comes with topicality. They are looking for something else, trying to move towards new frameworks for thinking. 

The title Turnstones hopes to evoke that which becomes the means to an act of turning. It suggests that every structure that has sedimented over time contains another possibility, something imprinting the earth that is still overshadowed. It responds to a year of unprecedented crisis that marks a transition into the unknowable. 

Turnstones is a word found in a poem that, being unknown, offers the freedom to imagine. The dictionary says it is a small bird, whose long beak enables it to dig under objects and find nourishment where others have not looked. This too is apt.

Lucy Cotter’s (b. Cork, Ireland) multidisciplinary practice explores aesthetics, politics, and the unknown through writing, curating, ficto-theory, and performance. Her curatorial projects include being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), and, most recently, The Unknown Artist at the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland (2020). A regular contributor to journals such as Flash Art, Frieze, Mousse Magazine, and Third Text, her latest book Reclaiming Artistic Research was published in 2019. She is currently working on an experimental play entitled The Entangled Museum, which circles around issues of restitution, cultural beliefs, and the limits of acceptable knowledge. Cotter holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and currently lectures on the MA Art and Social Practice at Portland State University.

The 2020-21 Curator in Residence Season 10 is supported by the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition, Oregon Cultural Trust, The Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation, The Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, The Mondriaan Fund, and the North Portland Trust Fund. Disjecta Contemporary Art Center is also supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Robert & Mercedes Eichholz Foundation, Maybelle Clark McDonald Fund, James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Arts and Culture Emergency Fund, Oregon CARES, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and the VIA Art Fund & Wagner Foundation. Other businesses and individuals provided additional support.

Past Curators in Residence Rachel Adams (Season 4), Lucy Cotter (Season 10), Summer Guthery (Season 3), and Suzy Halajian (Season 8) reflect on their CIR seasons in a Zoom panel moderated by Blake Shell. Watch the recording here.