Public Programs

Trajectory and Display

Tour with Sarah Greig, Thérèse Mastroiacovo and curator Michèle Thériault

Saturday November 19th, 3 pm
Free, at the Gallery

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On the last day of the exhibition Thinking Again and Supposing, curator Michèle Thériault, and artists Sarah Greig and Thérèse Mastroiacovo come together to casually exchange on questions of display and transformation in the ongoing trajectory of the exhibition.

Tour in Arabic

Tuesday, September 27th, 5:30 PM
In the Gallery
Free, in Arabic

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Join educator and artist Lynn Kodeih for a tour in Arabic of our current exhibition Thinking again and supposing. Trajectory of an exhibition. Curated by Michèle Thériault, the exhibition brings together works by Sarah Greig and Thérèse Mastroiacovo to consider their mutual commitment to conceptual drawing, open-ended processes, artistic labour, and strategies of display.

Part of a recurrent program, these tours reserve space for Arabic speakers in Montreal to meet at the Gallery and engage in critical exchanges on contemporary art and exhibition making.

Conversation: Sarah Greig and Eric Lewis

Tuesday, October 4, 6:00 PM
In English
Free, at the Gallery

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In this guided discussion with Sarah Greig, we will open up space to consider her work in Thinking Again and Supposing. Trajectory of an Exhibition from a number of perspectives/views and conceptual locations. Precisely how do these works reveal process, and what process or processes? How is the gallery visitor implicated in these works, how do they enter into the process? What histories of seeing and documentation are being revealed here, and why? How is structure, process, action and improvisation being treated, and themselves improvised with? We will tour the exhibit stopping to focus on particular works, Greig’s graphic score important among them, and also have time to invite the audience to ask questions, to enter into the process of entering into her process, acts which themselves can be seen as bringing into full actuality the works being shown.

Local Records: Sonia Sheridan Fonds with AM Trépanier

Thursday, October 20, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
In French and English
Free, at the Médiathèque, Cinémathèque québecoise, 335 boul de Maisonneuve E.
RSVP: robin.simpson@concordia.ca

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In art lingo, a study typically refers to a work that captures a moment with a future composition in mind, or an exercise aimed at building skills for who is executing it.

As artists, Sarah Greig and Thérèse Mastroiacovo place study at the heart of their practice, asserting a “generative ‘unfinishedness’” in their works. Their rigorous processes of image capture and (re)generation through drawing correlate with the dynamic thinking behind the Generative Systems program, created and directed by artist Sonia Landy Sheridan (1925-2021). On offer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1970 to 1980, this unique program focused on the transmission between artists, industrialists, scientists, and students, and was anchored to the technical apparatuses—copiers of all sorts, analogue synthesizers, computers, software, and video cameras—found in the classroom. For the lab coat-garbed students who passed through the program these technologies became at once the subject and the tools of study.

The archives of the vast undertaking that made up Generative Systems are preserved in the Sonia Sheridan fonds, acquired by the Daniel Langlois Foundation in 2005 and transferred to the Cinémathèque Québécoise in 2011, where they are kept today. The documents within underscore Sheridan’s role as a precursor in the fields of art, media, technology, and pedagogy. From a selection of prints, technical drawings, personal notes, pedagogical material, slides and videos, this workshop will examine the study as a generative method at the heart of creative practice.

Picture Transition (A block with holes)
Quatuor Bozzini

Tuesday October 25, 2022
18h

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Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, McConnell Building, 1400 De Maisonneuve. Blvd W.

A work made in place is unmade and then remade for the Ellen Gallery as a graphic score and performed by the string quartet Quatuor Bozzini.

Picture Transition (a block with holes)

I think of the graphic score as a kind of block with holes, through which a material is extruded or drawn out into thin lines. But perhaps it’s not a block at all but a process, a way into and out of, a channel through which some things are brought and others by necessity are left behind. More specifically, the material here is a camera built in the shape of its context, but this could be understood as anything made to fit within an existing structure. If the structure is built and unbuilt, as it is here, the thing made to fit changes, thickening into a viscous consistency, stronger now because it remains flexible, opposing forces held simply in balance, to build structure again differently.

Protraction creates space between the elements, draws material into time. This is the process of translating one context into another. A set of former display cameras rendered in an extruded view is forced through a die. The graphic score is the block through which it is drawn, a process to create a new shape, as sound now in the shape of the room it’s in. The string quartet Quatuor Bozzini plays the graphic score between rooms of the Ellen Gallery separated by shared walls, which creates a certain kind of blindness between the players. They listen instead for openings, even hear them before they sound, responding to points of contact in tone, noise and silence, and together pull the line through.

Sarah Greig