Alison Cooley

Writer, Curator, Educator Middlebrook Prize Winners

  • Toronto ON

Alison Cooley is a joint winner of the 2014 Middlebrook Prize.

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Biography

Alison Cooley is a critic, curator, and educator currently based in Toronto. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Saskatchewan, and an MA in Art History from York University. She was the 2014 recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, and a 2015 resident in the Banff International Curatorial Institute’s Critical Art Writing Ensemble. Her writing has appeared in FUSE, Canadian Art, Blackflash, and the Journal of Curatorial Studies, among other publications.

Industry Expertise

Research
Writing and Editing
Fine Art

Areas of Expertise

Art History
Museum Education
Contemporary Art
Curatorial Projects

Accomplishments

Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators

2014-01-01

Awarded for the exhibition I'm Feeling Lucky.

Banff International Curatorial Institute Residency

2015-04-20

Research-based "Critical Art Writing Ensemble" thematic residency at the Banff Centre

Education

University of Saskatchewan

B.A.

Studio Art and Art History

2010

York University

M.A.

Art History

2013

Articles

Canada's Galleries Fall Short: The Not-So Great White North

Canadian Art

2015-04-21

BY ALISON COOLEY, AMY LUO AND CAOIMHE MORGAN-FEIR

Taking a cue from the recent circulation of gallery breakdowns—including revisitations of the Guerilla Girls’ original gallery report card and the Art Newspaper’s findings that one-third of solo shows in the US go to artists represented by five galleries—we began to look into the demographics of solo exhibitions at Canadian public institutions. This accounting also has its roots in the work done by Joyce Zemans, whose infinitely more methodical and extensive research has offered quantitative data about the careers of female artists in Canada. Taking a more restricted focus, we have collated information on institutional solo exhibitions, as we feel that these shows function as a critical measure of artistic success, a marker of establishment and a necessary step in an established artist’s career.

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Sarah Anne Johnson and the Public Lives of Private Images

Blackflash Magazine

2015-01-15

Who are Sarah Anne Johnson’s images for? When Winnipeg photographer Sarah Anne Johnson’s most recent Toronto exhibition, “Wonderlust,” opened in the spring of 2014, she stated that her goal was to “explore the internal world of sexual intimacy. To show what it looks and feels like.” Johnson promised an exhibition of something private—personal, vulnerable, risky—an ambitious attempt to transmit a sense of this tenderness through the media of the photograph.

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Tatiana Grigorenko and Zoë Heyn-Jones: The Disappeared

Gallery 44

2015-01-16

How does the body disappear? Perhaps you were taught this way, as I was: Do you have a compost at home? What happens when you put a banana peel in your compost? It breaks into tiny pieces which become the soil. Bacteria, worms, and fungus chew it into smaller and smaller pieces, so that soon it looks just like everything else. We call it decomposition. This is what happens to the body. It goes away, but we remember. In the work of Tatiana Grigorenko and Zoë Heyn-Jones, the body disappears more insidiously. As the body is made absent, so too is memory: the archive of physical presence is expunged.

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