Treva Michelle Legassie is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator, artist and a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her research questions the particular modes of collecting, classifying, conserving, and curating art that are becoming necessary in the present geological era of the Anthropocene. By examining contemporary curatorial practices of environmental and site-specific art, her scholarship builds on current work calling for a new ethics of care that is bound to transversal and collaborative relationships between artist and curator, human and nonhuman, object and artist. Ultimately her research questions; how curation and environmental site-specific art as ‘practices of care’ can help to reimagine response-able modes for living on a damaged planet?
Legassie is the founder and director of the Curatorial Collective at Milieux and Assistant Director of the Speculative Life Cluster, and a researcher at the Ethnography Lab in the Waterways group. Her writing has been published in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, De Gruyter Open Cultural Studies, 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 #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines at OCAD University and co-ordinated Cheryl Sim’s YMX: Land and Loss after Mirabel. Legassie holds an MA from OCAD University in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories, and a BFA from OCAD University majoring in Criticism and Curatorial Practice with a studio minor. Her Master’s Thesis, published in 2016, “Whimsical Bodies: Agency and Playfulness in Robotic Art” won OCAD University’s Outstanding Thesis Award in 2016.