About

Never Gallery Ready aims to EDUCATE on the role and function of media, ANIMATE a variety of content, tools and tactics available to message-creators and FACILITATE the creation of works of art driven by individual and community voice. Never Gallery Ready’s inclusive cut & paste techniques allow community members of all ages and skill levels to: name themselves as artists and critical thinkers; react and respond to the messages they see around them; feel empowered to create new messages and share their stories.

Never Gallery Ready (NgR) is an arts organization providing media-literacy focused arts education to children and youth. Workshop series and projects explore media messages and content-creation through a variety of mediums, including: paper and digital collage, sound art, zine-making, site-specific installations, photography, video-loops and mashups, gifs, infographic posters, memes and emojis and emerging technologies such as augmented reality.

NgR workshops are rooted in collage concepts, culture jamming / counter-narrative tactics, social justice stories and emphasize making works for the intended purposes of spreading new meaning and amplifying marginalized narratives to the world. NgR’s digital arts programs involve literacy learning as it relates to building and maintaining online audiences in ways that are safe and ethical by directly supporting young people in uploading works to pixabay, giphy, youtube and various social media platforms.

Following a Chalmers Fellowship funded period of research (2014), NgR’s digital arts and literacy projects that incorporate audio/visual information accessed through analog, digital and personal archives/libraries. Never Gallery Ready (NgR) workshops and projects have been hosted by schools across 6 Ontario school boards since 2006. NgR is an official partner of the Toronto District School Board since 2016., and Google Arts and Culture Institute since 2019. Never Gallery Ready produces resources for media-makers and media literacy educators to explore with learners and support emerging creatives.

The #WeMakeMedia podcast provides insights into the art forms and media literacy framework at the core of NgR programming.

Recent funding partners include:

NEVER GALLERY READY team members past and present

Founding artistic director karen darricades

karen darricades is an artist, educator, writer, community activist and award winning youth worker living in Toronto. She have facilitated workshops and projects under the Never Gallery Ready banner to thousands of students and community members both inside the classroom and through community organizations throughout Southern Ontario since 2006. She is the host of the #WeMakeMedia podcast and the Head of Arts and Culture at Creative Commons Canada.

Her art works have been exhibited through Gallery 1313, Luc Sculpture Gallery, The Gladstone Hotel, Toronto Free Gallery, Toronto's Visual Fringe Festival, The World of Threads festival: a Common Threads International Exhibit, and commissioned works have been sold through The Textile Museum of Canada's shop. Her writing has been published in print for This Magazine, HERizons Magazine, Broken Pencil, Nukta Art, Peru This Week, and online at TextileArtist.org and Ca.CreativeCommons.net.

Artist Statement

Responding to and re-framing found images and existing environments is central to my community-engaged arts practice. My workshops are as much a product of my education in visual arts and linguistics (University of Toronto), photography and visual communications (EFET- École de Communication Visuelle, Paris, France), as they are of my brief but impactful experiences in a variety of fields (including film, forum theatre, publishing and anti-violence education).

karendarricades.com

Mixed Reality ARts Project (2020) Co-coordinator and Youth Mentor

Cathleen Calica is a queer filipinx multi-media artist, curator and producer born in Philippines, base in Tkaronto, Canada. She is the Director/founder of 187 Augusta, DIY community arts space for the past 3 years that mainly focuses on holding spaces for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) identified women and LGBTQ+ communities. Her creative theme's are inspired about nature, spirituality, sci-fi, psychology, and the untold stories of the bipoc womxn and queers of colour. Find her work on Instagram @yunguava.

Picture This! Digital Arts Camp (2018) Project Documentarian /Photographer Mentor

Sama is a graduate of Ryerson University's Performance Production BFA program. She has worked extensively as a stage manager, program coordinator, and event manager for organizations such as the Illumine Media Project, Toronto International Film Festival, and Toronto Fringe Festival. She has led many creative projects and managed both small and large-scale events. Sama continues to work with art-based not-for-profit organizations, youth empowerment programs, and grassroots film and theatre initiatives across Toronto.

Sound Engineer, #WeMakeMedia Podcast season 1 - Making Art in the Age of the Internet

Gabriel Munro is a writer, composer, and the Communications Director for Amarok Society, a Canadian charity that teaches mothers to become neighbourhood teachers in the developing world. He has recently received a Radio Broadcasting Diploma from Humber College, and continues working to ensure the accessibility of education overseas. gabrielmunro.ca

Program documentation and Google Arts and Culture Partner Page assistant

As a Humber College placement stunt in 2020. Kaeli Vanbendegem worked to support the massive undertaking of getting almost 400 exhibits metadata uploaded to our official Google Arts and Culture Institute’s partner page. She also documented our first (and last) in-person podcast recording at the Toronto Public Library in 2020.

What does Never Gallery Ready mean?

Gallery-ready art is art that is ready to be installed or hung in a gallery space. This term can be found in art exhibiting submission calls, e.g. “all artwork submitted for exhibition consideration must be gallery ready”. Never Gallery Ready is a title I came up with in 2006 to emphasize the process-oriented focus of my workshops. NgR is about thinking and interacting with ubiquitous messages, pushing back against dominant narratives in playful and creative ways, and spreading messages to audiences and peers. It’s not so much about the producing of pretty things but more about creating new meaning and art experiences for audiences that extend beyond the art world and gallery space. The title Never Gallery Ready has grown to take on new relevance with the proliferation of internet art, participatory-media landscapes and XR media futures.