Treva Pullen-Legassie

Thesis title: The river meanders still: Curation as research-creation for an unknowable exhibition

Treva Pullen-Legassie (she/her) is a PhD graduate, curator, and artist born and based in Tkaronto, Treaty 13 territory. Her research-creation dissertation was as an interdisciplinary exhibition that speaks to and from ‘The Narrows’ of the Lower Don Valley in Tkaronto.

A channelized section of the Lower Don River, The Narrows has historically been a site of conflict; from the city’s industrial development around the waterway to its use as a site for discarding waste and detritus, a space of refuge for those pushed to the edges of society, and more recently as a contested site of ecological restoration and rehabilitation. For more than two centuries the river has been harnessed in order to develop Canada’s largest urban metropolis. Engaging in a curatorial practice as research-creation, Pullen-Legassie’s dissertation tends to the many histories and interlocutors of The Narrows as a borderland in Tkaronto/Toronto’s Indigenous and settler colonial histories.

As a curator, her process values embodied and incidental knowledge and a commitment to Land and its vast complexity. Pullen-Legassie is one of the co-founders of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective. Her writing has been published in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, PUBLIC Journal, The Senses & Society, InterARTive, JAWS and AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. She has also curated new media based exhibitions such as Femynynytees (2018), #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines and co-ordinated Cheryl Sim’s YMX: Land and Loss after Mirabel. Her doctoral research was supported by the J.W. McConnell Memorial Doctoral Fellowship and FRQSC Doctoral Research Scholarship.