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October 22 - November 16
Vernissage + Publication Launch - Thursday November 1, 7-9 PM
CONTESTED SITE: ARCHIVES AND THE CITY
Curatorial Statement
Contested Site: Archives and the City is a peer-reviewed exhibition constructed as a complementary discursive engagement with the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) conference being hosted by Concordia University this fall. The exhibition highlights the emerging phenomenon of research/creation, which is redefining institutions, pedagogy, funding agencies and artistic practice in a reflexive manner, as perhaps a contested site itself.
The parallels and distinctions between artists’ practices and the responsive fields that surround them are complex, due in part to the differing valuation afforded to each. The works on offer here are primary documents that do not illustrate or expand upon rhetorical concerns, but instead call to the imagination and set in motion experience as indivisible from thought. The exhibition framework is discursive, laying bare the networks, individuals, and communities that collectively construct the perceived whole, while concurrently amplifying the distinct methodologies and media required to do so. To this end, the exhibition is comprised of three distinct methods of publication—gallery exhibition, resource centre, and a boxed set of publications titled, LES CAHiERS. The three sites have been employed as a method of recognizing distinctions within and between practices, and the media specificity of each terrain. While the academic language supporting equivalency within research/creation exists, the site in this expanded field is still one of persistent negotiation.
Curatorial Team:
Christopher Moore (Associate Professor, Department of Design and Computation Arts) and jake moore (Director, FOFA Gallery)
Exhibiting Artists:
LES CAHiERS
June Ying-Li Aldinucci/Peter C. van Wyck, NUMBERING NUMBERS: URBAN SEMIOLOGY AND PRACTICAL PEDAGOGY
Max Beer/Deena Dlusy-Apel, MONTREAL JEWISH MEMORIES
Tess Edmonson + Celia Perrin Sidarous, THE BOOK OF THINGS/ LE LIVRE DES CHOSES
Shauna Janssen, URBAN OCCUPATIONS URBAINES
Douglas Moffat, LOSTENING
François Morelli, MOONWALK
Emmelyne Pornillos/Candice Tarnowski, ORDER
RECTO/VERSO Collective: Tina Carlisi/Joshua Fourney/Katerina Lagassé, MANIFESTATION/DÉMONSTRATION
Jeff Scheible, DEPTH OF FIELD
Matt Soar, FARINE FIVE ROSES
York Corridor Vitrines
Thomas Kneubühler, OFFICE 2000
Main Gallery
Andrew De Freitas, L'ESPACE QUOTIDIEN
Shauna Janssen, URBAN OCCUPATIONS URBAINES
Alison Loader, GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE: THE INQUEST OF MARY GALLAGHER
Stephen Lawson/Aaron Pollard, DARLING ARCARDE
Douglas Moffat, MONTREAL PHONOGRAPHE/VIENNA PHONOGRAPHE
François Morelli, MOONWALK
Celia Perrin Sidarous, THE BOOK OF THINGS
Étienne Tremblay-Tardif, PLAN INTERSECTÉ POUR LA RÉFLECTION DE L'ÉCHANGEUR TURCOT (POLYPTYQUE 08)
Steven Woloshen, CARBON COPIES
Resource Centre
Andrew Forster, YUL COMPETITION/MONTREAL TRAJECTORY
Taien Ng-Chan, ACADIE FENCE
Douglas Moffat, MONTREAL PHONOGRAPHE
Emmelyne Pornillos/Candice Tarnowski, ORDER
Matt Soar, FARINAGRAMS
Ste-Catherine Street Vitrine
École de la Montagne Rouge, TERI TANE NOTE MITI
Sculpture Garden Courtyard
Matthew Thomson, COLLECTOR
FOFA Gallery Atrium
Deirde Logue/Allyson Mitchell, FAG Feminist Art Gallery (Toronto), CAN'T/WON'T
Resource Centre
The resource centre performs as a space of mediation between works intended for exhibition and a living archive of ephemera, notations, and supplementary materials that constitute an artist’s praxis. These documents and media artifacts extend the temporal life of the works on display, representing both the germinal stages of development, as well as the articulated products of public dissemination. Visitors to the centre are invited to activate the space, completing the inexplicit curatorial narrative, and positioning the work according to an idiosyncratic network of associations. Through discovery and investigation, and privileging the immediacy of lived experience, we wish to catalyze a process of research for all who enter this site.
LES CAHiERS Publication
LES CAHiERS, further extend the exhibition’s temporality and shift the site of reception to one of your own choosing. This collection of small format volumes presents text, notations, and ephemera as works in and of themselves. The publications are not framing documents or responses to artistic production, nor validation of a methodology, they are but one relational component of the discursive praxis of research/creation.
Publication design:
Pata Macedo (Part-time instructor, Department of Design and Computation Arts)
Publication production team:
Tina Carlisi, (MA student, art education), Joshua Fourney (MA student, Individualized Program), Jacquelyn Hébert (MFA student, studio arts), Christiana Myers (FOFA Gallery intern, funded by a New Brunswick Arts Council grant), Kyle Goforth (BFA student, design)
Concurrent Programming
Beyond the vernissage and publication launch, there are various events that take place concurrent with the exhibtion. See below for more information:
At FOFA GALLERY
Emmelyne Pornillos/Candice Tarnowski: Ongoing Project Research
Wednesdays October 31, November 7 and 14, 1-2 PM
Thursdays November 8 and 15, 6-7 PM
FOFA Gallery Resource Centre
Emmelyne Pornillos/Candice Tarnowski: Readings/Narration
Wednesday November 14, 1-2 PM
Thursday November 15, 6-7 PM
FOFA Gallery Resource Centre
The project, titled Order, was conceived last April and is the second collaboration between Emmelyne Pornillos and Candice Tarnowski that investigates religious orders in Québec. The first was the production of an event marking the significance of the Jesuit-established Loyola Chapel as a contemporary sacred architecture. From this project emerged parallels in our personal narratives and a mutual interest in how gestures of service and care are practiced by women, the potential overlap in the daily domestic and professional practices of members of religious Orders and of artists and designers, and how these practices take form and function within specific architectures and spaces.
For the Contested Site Resource Centre, Emmelyne and Candice have transported a bookshelf containing many of their Grey Nuns textual materials to the reading room where they will continue research for their project Order. Couched in this they will give two readings (aloud!) of excerpts taken from books in their shelf.
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Paths to Knowledge: A Performance by Mélanie Binette
Friday November 2, 1 PM & 8 PM, EV 14th Floor
Paths to Knowledge is a site-specific performance that questions our relation to knowledge, the institution, and the city.
How do the body, the imagination and memory interact with each other to build the spectator’s experience during a site-specific performance? How do we attend to the world in the context of reception? And how is it possible to evaluate experience, which can be singular and communal all at once? My research interrogates the power of testimonies for documenting and transmitting performance.
Mélanie Binette is an MA student in the Individualized Program, as well as director of the Montréal based site-specific theatre company Théâtre Nulle Part.
* Participants will be led to a specific Concordia space and will not be sitting—please wear comfortable shoes. Gather at the elevator lobby on the Engineering side of the 14th floor of the EV building. Please arrive ON TIME.
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Contesting Research-Creation: Challenges in and to Institutionalizing Creativity
Tuesday November 6, 5-7 PM, FOFA Gallery
As the notion(s) of research-creation develop and become institutionalized (in ourselves, in our practices, in our organizations), it becomes necessary to explore what kind of support the construct gives us, and what kind of barriers it puts up. What kinds of knowledge does research-creation facilitate, and how do they fit (or not) within existing institutional frameworks? Ultimately, is this institutionalization affecting our practices, and if so, what are the futures of both our work processes and of the concept of research-creation itself? This discussion is aimed at engaging the extended Concordia community in these questions while exploring some of the ways that the processes of research-creation are unfolding in the realms of art, critical studies, media, technology, sensory studies, and food.
Panelists: Lynn Hughes, Shauna Janssen, Louis Perreault, David Szanto
Facilitator: Florencia Marchetti
At External Locations
Learning from...Chisasibi: Thomas Kneubühler and Ernest Webb
Thursday October 25, 7 PM, Candian Centre for Architecture, CCA
FOFA Gallery exhibiting artist, Thomas Kneubühler, is participating in a conversatoin with filmmaker Ernest Webb, that takes place at the CCA. The conversation will be moderated by Alessandra Ponte.
For more information on this event, please click here.
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From MacLaren to Woloshen: A Journey of Animation Without a Camera
Friday November 30, 2-3:30 PM
Saturday December 2, 1-2:30 PM
Cinémathèque québécoise, Salle Claude Jutra, 335, boul. De Maisonneuve Est Montréal, Métro Berri-UQAM
This retrospective was first screened at Lille's "Fete de L'anim in March of 2012". Essentially, its' Curator, Marcel Jean describes this program as "a path that goes Norman McLaren, a pioneer of (scratching) and drawing on film, Steven Woloshen, who today, continues the tradition of animation without camera. On this journey full of surprises, a few meetings with key figures of experimental animation in Quebec (translation)." Since the first screening, the program was updated and now includes the works of Karl Lemieux, Marie Josee Saint - Pierre, Chris Hinton and many other Contemporary figures on Quebec experimental animation scene.
Cinematheque's detailed program
Sommet des Animation pdf schedule of events
Links
Site
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UAAC
Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) Conference
PDF of the Call for submission
Acknowledgements
We are immensley grateful to the artists who demonstrated such trust in the development of this project and allowed us access to their works at a tender and intimate level. We offer exceptional gratitude to the production and gallery teams who, as always, go beyond expectations in delivering innovative programming in a spirit of camaraderie that both moves and sustains us. Dr. Anne Whitelaw, Art History Faculty member and UAAC Vice-President, has been a generous and affecting colleague. The supports - moral, intellectual, and fiscal - offered by her and her team have been germinal to this project and resonate throughout it. Lastly, the curators and FOFA Gallery wish to thank the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University for their financial contribution to the project.
*images credit (left to right): Matt Soar, an anagram from the from the Farinagrams series, 2009-2012, ongoing; Douglas Moffat, Phonograph Outline Revised from the Stylus A Montreal Phonograph series, 2007; Celia Perrin Sidarous, no. 16 from The Book Of Things photograph series, 2008-2012, ongoing.
© Concordia University