I AM Resilience and Reciprocity
This exhibition brings together a selection of individual and collaborative student works from artist residencies in 18 elementary schools over the 2024/25 school year through the Artist in Residence Studio Program or AIRS. The title, I AM Resilience and Reciprocity, reflects resonant themes across diverse studios settings, project conceptions and art processes and calls attention to the relational nature of growth as human beings, as a continual dialogue and choreographed movement between inner reflection and communal interaction; inside and outside, self and world.
You will find artworks of resilience, attune to the voice of our authentic and intuitive selves through artmaking process, that celebrate the strength of who we are. These include large amorphous paper mache puppets representing complex emotions; clay stories of courage and overcoming, photographic portraits of resilience, and poetry masks embracing aspects of ourselves that we’d rather hide. There are abstract works using light and paint that are open felt truths beyond words; zines that delight in the whimsical twists of our imagination and honour the things we hold dear; and proliferous stickers that playfully transform the mundane objects of the everyday into zany and subversive assemblages.
Adjacent to this are projects that attend to our reciprocal relationship back out into the world, and that cultivate meaningful connection to the land, waters, ancestors and neighbourhood communities. These include processes that invite relational respect for materials and their potentiality and practices of slow looking that foster creative attention and care for the more than human world. Old, new and repurposed technologies, such as printmaking, scanning and collage animation, become a space for exploring the historical memory, and future imagining of place and neighbourhood communities, and our agency and responsibility in their reshaping. Collaborative artworks made in and for community, are themselves acts of reciprocity and generous participation in the building of inclusive spaces and belonging.
In the disorientation of our current times - the violation of internationally held human rights, erosion of democratic processes and soaring economic inequalities, amidst unchecked disinformation silos and the catastrophic impacts of climate breakdown - I AM: Resilience and Reciprocity bares witness to the essential role of the arts in education, in cultivating the critical and creative capacities that matter more than ever; the capacity to see and find the beauty in the world and one another, to value integrity to the core of who we are, to extend compassion and mutual care to those around us, and to newly imagine and hold true to the possibility of a more just and equitable shared world.
The arts matter. The voices of children matter. We invite you to take time to pause and attend with openness, to the ideas, dreams and expressions of children through art; to be inspired and realise our own and collective capacities for resilience and reciprocity.
Support the AIRS program through Donation
We invite you to be part of our story in realizing the transformative potential of the arts for children in schools. All donations, big and small, make a difference.