THALIA STEFANIUK
Afterimage by Thalia Stefaniuk:
Even though I’m a curator, I hardly have any art hanging on my walls at home. One of the only images I’ve put up isn’t even an artwork—it’s an iPhone photo my family took of me, surrounded by friends at the opening of my 2024 exhibition Weight of Mind at the Hessel Museum in upstate New York. I love the contrast in this image: the show—a sculpture and photography exhibition featuring Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock—explores memory, the body, and the tension between the visible and invisible forces that shape both. And yet, ironically, it contains no easily recognizable bodies. The artists fragment, disfigure, and hybridize body parts, merging them with other materials to create unfamiliar forms. But in this photo, it’s all familiar bodies—many of my closest friends (not all pictured), shoulder to shoulder, filling every inch and spilling out of the frame.
When I moved to New York, I had to leave behind the community I’d spent my entire adult life building in Montreal and Toronto. It felt like I was turning away from something real and grounding toward something intangible and uncertain. As an only child, friendship and community have never been things I take for granted—they’ve always been something I’ve worked hard for. I began falling into a kind of echo chamber in my head, a self-fulfilling prophecy: I feel isolated, therefore I am isolated. But that wasn’t true. My people were with me, supporting me every step of the way. And at the opening, I got to experience the physical manifestation of that support.
Almost all my friends and family from Montreal, Toronto, and New York came. They piled into cars, booked Airbnbs, and most of them crammed into my tiny one-bedroom apartment, sleeping in rows like sardines in sleeping bags. I remember spending weeks alone in the gallery during planning and installation, and then—suddenly—it was filled with the bodies of my friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators. People from every stage of my life, all moving through the stories, materials, and histories of the artwork I care so deeply about.
In Kaari Upson’s installation, eleven, she embedded casts of her knees into casts of trees from the landscape of her childhood home—a place marked by complicated memories. She literally fuses the idea of home with the physicality of the body. It’s not a romantic image of nostalgia. The limbs hover in a haunting, dreamlike forest—weightless, disembodied, rootless. I painted the back wall of the gallery a cartoon-like sky blue and spaced the works widely apart to heighten that feeling of suspension. I wanted the public to feel the tension between lightness and gravity of the show—the formal sensation of being suspended and unmoored, alongside the emotional weight of the subject matter of each artwork, and the personal histories the public carry in their own bodies.
What I didn’t anticipate was what it would feel like to have others fill the negative space between the objects. For example, walking around the legs stirred the air and caused them to spin slightly. The people in the space—literally and metaphorically—animated the works and enlivened the connection between them. But seeing my community inhabit that space added a personal and emotional weight of having so many people I love in one space. An intense emotional high and a simultaneous feeling of being grounded that I’ll never forget. It reminded me of the profound power of physical gathering—how an audience can complete, complicate, and transform an exhibition in ways you can’t anticipate on your own.
Looking ahead, I dream of cultivating a collaborative practice that feels like a band or a collective. Before curating, I worked in film—long, 14-hour days on set created a kind of intense group energy. While trauma bonding doesn’t always lead to real friendship, at the end of the day, if I spend more time with my collaborators than anyone else in my life, I want to make those relationships meaningful. I want to work with people who care deeply about community, who take ideas and creativity seriously, and who are invested in building a sustainable way of working. I imagine a curatorial model grounded not just in conceptual or formal relationships between works, but in real human relationships between people, including artists, art workers, and the network of connections that each of those individuals brings with them.
The image on my wall from that opening is a kind of evidence. Sometimes I need reminders—fragments of proof—because it’s easy to get lost in your own narrative. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: the art world feeds off a scarcity model and myth of isolated genius—never enough space, never enough opportunity, a careerist culture of eat-or-be-eaten. The hunger for validation is a bottomless pit. It will never be enough. I am currently working my dream job in curation at the New Museum but even now there’s still always a “next thing”—there’s no final mountaintop where you arrive.
So I try to reframe the picture—literally and metaphorically. I adjust the aperture. I redefine what accomplishment means. For me, it’s these bonds—this rhizomatic support system—that I return to. For a long time, I kept a rejection letter from a theatre school I desperately wanted to attend framed on my wall as motivation—a reminder that good and bad things are two sides of the same coin, and that neither should be clung to too tightly. But I’ve replaced it now. I chose this photo instead. It’s also a motivator—but one that celebrates the connections I’ve made, the ongoing and slow-moving process, not just the moments of success or failure.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.