Thinking Spaces
Thinking Spaces is a free series of talks by innovative scholars, artists, and improvisers. We’re excited to announce our Winter 2026 Thinking Space session, curated by Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. An Kosurko, will feature writer Wendy Trusler speaking at ImprovLab (University of Guelph) at 1pm on Wednesday, October 28th.
In this talk, “Keeper of Things: Art, the archive, and purging epic fails,” Wendy asks us to consider, “why do we keep things?” What is thing you need, but don’t need, the thing you can’t part with? What can it tell you? What does this have to do with art? What does this have to do with improvisation?
Part installation, performance, and travelling archive, this Thinking Space will invite us to consider ideas about the nature of performance, interpretation, classification, preservation, and ways of knowing: the cognitive and intuitive, the personal and universal. In an interactive presentation and sampling of her archival projects, Trusler will share her art-making process and how failed attempts to clean her studio manifest in her art practice and have resulted in the creation of an archive of over 4000 letters, written in six languages, spanning 213 years.
Wendy Trusler
Public Art Faciliator, former Food Stylist, and history graduate, Wendy Trusler is a nationally recognized Chalmers Art Fellow who creates performative environments and communities in which participants are invited to share their stories, histories, memories and archives. She presents work in contexts ranging from galleries, storefront windows, industrial spaces, and parks to encourage dialogue about what art can be and where it can be found.
Wendy’s work is held in corporate, private, and public collections including Coca Cola Co, Global Television, Cambium Consulting & Engineering, Trent University and the Art Gallery of Peterborough. Trusler is an Associate of the Ontario College of Art and holds a degree in History from the University of Western Ontario. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, was shortlisted for Taste Canada Food Writing Awards in 2014 (Best Culinary Narrative) and received a Chalmers Art Fellowship in 2015. Trusler was Public Art Facilitator for the City of Peterborough from 2015 -2025. Her interdisciplinary practices include drawing, encaustic painting, writing, sculpture, performance, photography, film and site-responsive installations. Much of her work examines the nature of memory and the ways in which recollections are organized into what we understand as history. Shaped by her experiences living in seclusion in wild places, Wendy’s work explores ideas around ecology, continuity and regeneration through both her material choices and process. She is represented by Isadore & Dunn Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
Recent projects include The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning; Collective Vision, a curatorial project in the Mental Health Services Department of the Peterborough Regional Health Centre; and Voices at Hand.
“My practice is in continual flux— an iterative form of improvisation where projects morph to serve a community or an idea. Some start as hybrids. Others take years to realize. I made two films, “Another Kind of Dance 1 and 2”, to animate “Dancing in a Northern Kitchen” 5-years after I created that bookwork. And my experiences in Antarctica yielded two distinct projects before they manifested in a book. “Voices at Hand”, pulled me into sociological fieldwork and performance and has sustained my attention for nearly two decades. I’m currently working on its final form.”
All Thinking Spaces talks take place in ImprovLab (MacKinnon Room 108, University of Guelph).
Started in 2015, the Thinking Spaces series has explored improvisation through public talks, workshops, special events, concerts, and reading sessions. To view the full archive of Thinking Spaces events, visit this page.
