Meet Stephanie Burdzy, Assistant Registrar, TMS Collections Information Specialist, Collection Information.

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What do you do at the AGO?

I contribute to the building, maintenance, and preservation of records in The Museum System (TMS). When I am not collaborating with my colleagues in Collections Management, Photo Resources, Curatorial, Conservation, and Exhibitions, I am busy cataloging works of art and conducting research on the permanent collection.

Is there something that you’d be willing to share that many people would not know about you?

I wasn’t always set on a career in the humanities. Before I began my undergraduate and master’s studies in visual art and art history, I spent many years riding horses and teaching others to do the same. In fact, I studied maths and sciences intensely in high school, in the hopes of becoming a large breed veterinarian.

 

What is your all-time favourite movie, musical artist or piece or book, and why?

My favourite painting of all time is Pierrot, formerly known as Gilles by Jean-Antoine Watteau (c. 1718-1719). Awkward and elegant, Watteau’s barefaced Pierrot turns away from the scene unfolding behind him to face the viewer. His frank expression conveys both frustration and apathy as an avatar of artistic alienation.

It is tempting to feel drawn to this ambiguous figure during periods of creative exhaustion. I believe that certain images haunt us throughout our lives: The week I turned in my master’s thesis, Pierrot and I found each other in the space of a small canvas at the end of Francis Alÿs: A Story of Negotiation.

 

Do you have a favourite work of art in the collection?

If I could pick two, I would choose Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), 2012, and Michael Hayden’s All Things Being Equal, 1974.

My impressions of Hayden’s work date back to my early childhood memories of looking at public art with my father. I remember being enthralled by the delicate neon tubes flickering inside the sculpture’s transparent case at the corner of Beverley and Dundas Streets. Of all the works that I have come to admire in this city, All Things Being Equal still holds the deepest fascination, for it forever changed my understanding of what a work of art could be.

As an adult, I admire these installations for the ways in which their complex institutional histories speak to a number of concerns that museum professionals confront on a daily basis