Sarah Greig + Thérèse Mastroiacovo
Public Programs
Trajectory and Display
Tour with Sarah Greig, Thérèse Mastroiacovo and curator Michèle Thériault
Saturday November 19th, 3 pm
Free, at the Gallery
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.
جولة باللغة العربية
الثلاثاء ٢٧ سبتمبر ، 5:30 مساءً
في الغاليري
مجاناً، بالعربية
انضموا إلى الفنانة والباحثة لين قديح في جولة ومحادثة باللغة العربية لمعرضنا الحالي “التفكير مرة أخرى، ثم الافتراض- مسار معرض”.
من تنسيق ميشيل تيريولت، يجمع المعرض أعمال سارة غريغ وتيريز ماستروياكوفو للنظر في التزامهما المتبادل بالرسم المفاهيمي والعمل الفني بمسار مفتوح واستراتيجيات العرض.
كجزء من برنامج متكرر، تخصص هذه الجولات مساحة للمتحدثين باللغة العربية في مونتريال للاجتماع في المعرض والمشاركة في التبادلات النقدية حول الفن المعاصر وصنع المعارض.
Tour in Arabic
Tuesday, September 27th, 5:30 PM
In the Gallery
Free, in Arabic
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
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.
Eric Lewis is a Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, whose research focuses on the aesthetics, ontology and politics of improvisatory arts. His books include From Fruit to Root: Medea Electronique’s Interactive Archive of New Media Art, Intents and Purposes: Philosophy and the Aesthetics of Improvisation, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, and The Video Art of Sylvia Safdie. He is active both as an improvisor on brass and electronics, and as an art curator. He is a member of Medea Electronique, an Athens-based collective of new media artists, runs the Koumaria improvised art residency, is the president of Arts in the Margins, director of Laboratory of Urban Culture, and sits on the management team of International Institute for the Critical Study of Improvisation. He is presently writing a book on Jeanne Lee, focusing on how experimental vocal techniques have been used in acts of identity formation by black women artists.
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
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.
AM Trépanier is an artist-researcher, editor, and master’s student in Media Studies at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal). They are a research assistant for the Digital Intimacy, Gender & Sexuality Lab and member of the Feminist Media Studio, both at Concordia. Their academic research examines the intersections between art and activism, self-determination, information infrastructure, as well as feminist and queer critiques of media and technology. Since 2018, they have co-directed with Laure Bougault the journal Cigale, a bilingual publication dedicated to the publication of artists’ writing. Their writing on art and culture has been published in various journals and magazines, such as Public Parking, Termes (Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen), OEI, Cigale, Sabir, Spirale, Synoptique: Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies et Architecture | Concordia.
Picture Transition (A block with holes)
Quatuor Bozzini
Tuesday October 25, 2022
18h
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
Quatuor Bozzini has been an original voice and strong advocate in new, experimental and classical music since 1999. Driving the hyper-creative Montréal scene and beyond, the quartet cultivates an ethos of risk-taking, experimentation, and collaboration, venturing boldly off the beaten track. With a rigorous eye for quality, they have nurtured a rich and diverse repertoire, regardless of trends. This has led to over 400 commissioned pieces, and some 500 premiered works. Their open, collaborative, artist-led approach has resulted in the realisation of numerous innovative and highly-praised productions, including inter-disciplinary projects with video, theatre and dance.
Thinking again and supposing. Trajectory of an exhibition
This series of public programs is part of the exhibition Thinking again and supposing. Trajectory of an exhibition, presented at the Gallery from September 7 to November 19, 2022.