Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross have engaged in a multi-disciplinary, research and site-based practice since 1998. Their work is primarily characterized by its investigations into the literal and metaphorical aspects of storage, the construction of social and manufactured spaces, and the inscription/invention of histories, both written and illustrated. Their collaborative and individual interests have included architectural propositions, photographic and digital video projects, and critical writing. Duclos and Ross consider all aspects of their projects—from pure research, to the rejuvenation of found materials and overlooked histories, to collaborations with other artists, students and designers—as critical to their work. Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross are based in Montreal.

For this collections-based exhibition project at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the phrase “As much as possible given the time and space allotted” is at once a title and a set of directions, a project description as well as a curatorial directive, a framework for action and a set of rules. The simple premise of the project is that as many works as possible will be removed sequentially from the gallery’s storage vault over a period of six weeks and installed in the gallery’s exhibition areas. Once the exhibition space is saturated, with all possible areas of wall and floor space occupied, the exhibition will ‘rest’ for two days. Following the resting period, the works will be sequentially returned to their place in the storage vault, leaving the gallery in its former “clean” state, thus marking the end of the project.

Because the gallery will be open to the public for the entire time that works are being installed, As much as possible provides an opportunity for the usually hidden activities of art installation and collection management to become a publicly accessible event. The viewing public will be encouraged to visit and revisit the exhibition daily or weekly to see the exhibition as it changes incrementally with each new addition — and then subsequent subtraction — of artworks.

In this way, as much as possible gestures not only to a previous history of conceptualism but also to a legacy of performance-based practices which construct a set of “actions” to be enacted as the primary activity of art-making. As collaborators, Duclos and Ross propose a hybrid project that co-opts these post-1960 “anti-institutional” postures and adapts them to a distinctly institutional scenario, creating a critique of curating that emphasizes the significance of artistic rather than museological models, operations of chance over the decisiveness of selection, the dynamic of duration over stasis, the power of juxtaposition as a form of interpretation, and the privileging of process over pedigree.

Because the project shifts the traditional terms of museological engagement with the permanent collection (which tends to elevate the directed scholarly research of the curator as providing a distinct narrative through which the exhibition’s works are to be understood), as much as possible allows other avenues of enquiry to open up.

The first is the possibility for the collection to “curate itself” through a system of random sequential display that—although initiated by Duclos, Ross, and gallery staff—is ultimately unpredictable in terms of the juxtapositions, confluences, and resonances that will be created between and amongst works exhibited in close proximity. Second is the substitution of the autonomously back-room-curated show with a real “show”—an event-based project that slowly releases works from the vault on a daily basis, handled by gallery staff and installed in full public view.

The combined public and performative aspect of the project finds another, perhaps unexpected, affinity with the architectural space in which the Gallery itself is located. Echoing the dynamic of Concordia’s McConnell Library Building whose public thoroughfare and commerce court lies just outside the gallery’s doors, as much as possible responds by making the exhibition space an equally active arena of constant movement with staff adding (and then subtracting) new works to/from the gallery’s walls each day, every day, as the exhibition runs its course over a six-week period. Wholly unable to mimic the true hustle and bustle of the atrium outside, the Ellen Art Gallery necessarily effects its own “economy of exchange” as stored objects become exhibited artworks, increasing their kind of visible “value” through an active process of being put on display.

Finally, the dynamic trajectory and intensity of certain kinds of curatorial and preparatory labour is re-directed through the project as normal exhibitionary procedures are extended through time and space (as much as is allotted). The entire curatorial endeavour becomes drawn out and may be observed like a real-time film or experienced as an event excessively lengthened.¹ The project thus allows gallery staff to replace the speed, tension, and invisibility of the installation and de-installation periods with a more “evolutionary” and potentially reflective engagement with the collection during the entire course of the exhibition. Effectively adopting and adapting the slower pace of the so-called “scholarly” postures of close study and careful comparison into their own daily practice as enacted within the space of the gallery over time, gallery staff inadvertently “model” for visitors aspects of a curatorial approach to collection making and interpretation that are most often kept hidden from view.

– Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross

¹ Loose comparisons might be made to Warhol’s Sleep or Leif Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch, for example.

The Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University holds approximately 1,700 works in its collection. At any given time, a portion of these works are installed throughout the University’s many buildings. In 2009 over sixty dispersed artworks were photographed in situ. In order to accommodate the project’s expansive desire to exhibit as many works as possible, these images act as proxies for those artworks that were not physically present in the vault at the time of the exhibition.