FOFA GALLERY

Preoccupations: Photographic Explorations of the Grey Nuns Mother House

An artistic commission is a form of staged encounter. Preoccupations is the photographic expression of encounters between twelve artists, commissioned by Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and a sprawling historic building that, since 1871, has been the home of a Roman Catholic Order, the Sisters of Charity, known since the Order’s foundation as the Grey Nuns.

The Mother House is a monument as well as a home to the individual women who inhabit and care for the building. The artists entered a space understood by its residents as constituting many realms: the sacred and the secular; the public and the private; the living and the dead; history and memory; transcendent existence and the necessities of daily life.

These ideas floated in a vast complex, designed in the 1860s by Montreal architect Victor Bourgeau (1809-1888) to function as the headquarters of a charitable organization, while symbolizing its beliefs and values. A prominent feature of the Mother House is the Chapel whose exterior expression, a steeple added in 1890, rises from the very heart of the complex. Designed in Romanesque style and inaugurated in 1878, the Chapel evolved through structural and decorative additions; it was declared a historic monument in 1974.

Below the Chapel lies the crypt which was the cemetery for 260 sisters who died between 1874 and 1896, many heartbreakingly young, having worked as nurses during typhoid and smallpox epidemics. Until 1961, the superiors general of the Sisters of Charity were entitled to be buried in the crypt, where there are also two common graves containing the remains of members translated from the original Mother House, which was at Pointe-à-Callière in the old city. The remains of the founder of the Order, Marguerite D’Youville (1701-1771), who was canonized in 1990, are enshrined in the mahogany altar in the sanctuary of the Chapel.

The social history of the Sisters of Charity shapes the rest of the complex, having housed the poor, the elderly, and the sick, as well as the thousands of novices, nuns, and associates of the Order, some now living in the hospital and palliative care unit at the east end of the building.

In 2004, Concordia University became the proprietor of the Grey Nuns’ Mother House, with a plan for phased-in turnover of the building and grounds, and a vision for its ultimate transformation into a centre for the arts – a home for the Faculty of Fine Arts. This photographic project is part of the envisioning process, introducing the preoccupations of curious newcomers to those of the resident sisters.

As curator, it was my privilege to select the twelve participants in the project from Concordia’s distinguished graduates and retired faculty. Jessica Auer, Claude-Philippe Benoit, Olga Chagaoutdinova, Denis Farley, Clara Gutsche, Thomas Kneubühler, Suzy Lake, Anne Ramsden, Sylvie Readman, Arthur Renwick, Gabor Szilasi, and Chih-Chien Wang agreed to participate in the project.
The artists were asked to make a photographic work that expressed the creative possibilities of the building. A diverse group, they responded with touching sincerity and singularity to their experience. Asked to imagine how the building might shape processes of photographic education and production, they incorporated the Mother House into their own artistic preoccupations, including expressions of place and personal identity.
Martha Langford

Artist: Chih-Chien Wang
Title: Mixed jelly on a table in a sunny afternoon
Year: 2009
Dimension: 101.6 x 127 cm (40" x 50")
medium: inkjet printing on paper

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $37.8 million in the arts in Quebec.