From Storage to Story: Reflections from the Collection at Art Windsor-Essex
By: Lana Zagorac
Working behind the scenes in a gallery often means spending long stretches of time with objects that most visitors encounter only briefly. As the Collections and Database Assistant at Art Windsor-Essex (AWE), my days were shaped by accession numbers, database records, condition notes, and archival files — but also by moments of quiet discovery, when a work of art revealed something unexpected the longer I sat with it.
Over the past year, I had the opportunity to engage deeply with AWE’s collection while contributing to Kissing Cousins: New Acquisitions in Context, an exhibition that pairs recent acquisitions with historical works from the gallery’s holdings. The exhibition emerged through careful research, comparison, and conversation, and it reflect the often-invisible labour that supports collecting practices: writing artwork justifications for the board, tracing provenance, preparing digital records, and asking difficult questions about why and how institutions collect.
As a Collections and Database Assistant, I worked closely with AWE’s collections management system, updating records, refining metadata, and ensuring new acquisitions were accurately documented and accessible. This role gave me a unique vantage point — I wasn’t just encountering artwork on the wall; I was learning how they move through institutional systems, how histories are preserved or obscured, and how decisions made today shape what future audiences will encounter.
Kissing Cousins made that process visible. Each pairing — whether between Lawren Harris and Jon Sasaki, Patricia Deadman and Betty Goodwin, or Arthur Shilling’s early and late works — reveals how artists across generations grapple with similar questions using radically different methods. The exhibition invites visitors into a conversation: art speaking back to art across decades, materials, and lived experience.
Working on Kissing Cousins allowed me to translate behind-the-scenes work into shared experiences. Explaining why a photograph of decaying industrial architecture sits beside an early modernist mining scene, or how microbial cultures grown from a historic paint palette echo spiritual landscapes, required careful attention to language, access, and audience. The exhibition reinforced that collections work does not end at storage or cataloguing — it comes alive when people are invited to the story.
That sense of dialogue extended into the artist talk I hosted with Catherine Heard, whose work appears alongside early 20th-century portrait miniature by Mary Wrinch. Preparing for the talk meant revisiting files, exhibition text, and material histories, while remaining attentive to how living artists experience their work within institutional context. The conversation underscored how contemporary artists aren’t only responding to history but actively reshaping it.
Throughout my time at AWE, I became increasingly aware of how interconnected collections work is with curatorial, educational, and public-facing practices. Writing artwork justifications sharpened my ability to articulate value and relevance. Working with databases taught me precision and care. Leading tours and talks grounded that work in human connection. Like Kissing Cousins itself, my role sat between past and present, object and audience, record and story — quiet, sometimes painstaking, and deeply rewarding. As I move forward in my career, I carry with me the understanding that meaningful gallery work happens not only in moments of display, but in the thoughtful labour that makes those moments possible.
