Sarah Greig + Thérèse Mastroiacovo
September 7 – November 19, 2022
Thinking again and supposing. Trajectory of an exhibition
Sarah Greig + Thérèse Mastroiacovo
Curator : Michèle Thériault
Opening on September 7, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Thinking again and supposing with Sarah Greig and Thérèse Mastroiacovo. This project is a process for us to reflect on and inquire into the mechanisms of working together, circulating thoughts, relationality, and giving materiality to a common project.
Greig and Mastroiacovo have accompanied each other in art practice. They both work in a form of conceptual drawing, a kind of process drawing: drawing as doing, as recording, in the present and over time. With a focus on the processes and intentions of artworks, the doing of it more than the end result, this shared way is manifest differently in practice. A dynamic based on the circulation of idea and on distancing. On one side to tussle and spar with the apparatus of art, and on the other, to consider and propose ways of inhabiting it.
I imagine the experience of the visitor as a series of open statements that may enable the process of thinking again, for myself, a curator who has worked in the space of the gallery—the one Sarah and Thérèse are now inhabiting—over many years with a particular attention to context, the conditions of display, and the discourse of the exhibition. At this point in time, the layers of succeeding exhibitions, of works, of layout and display strategies is thick and dense. The references that emanate from the porous layers inflect my relationship with their work and their particular relationship to this space and its history.
Underlying the process of work and the shaping of what the visitor can experience is a stance fully embraced by artists and curator in relation to artmaking in our time, to what is the outcome of a practice, to what motivates its realization. It’s not so much about outrightly claiming, affirming, naming, and revealing, as it is a discreet form of queering of the system in place, arising through the reluctance, if not the refusal of the prevailing conditions and demands of the art world.
MT, SG, TM
Event
Exhibition Floorplan
Commentaries
Press Release
Ways of Thinking
Sarah Greig holds a BFA in Drawing from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and an MFA in Open Media from Concordia University. For many years, she has made work in peripheral or inherently temporary sites. Using something from the site to make an image, the work in the end is a record of the process, a composition. And although it is manifested most often in photography, it is essentially process-based drawing. The making becomes the drawing itself, the parameters of its condition become its eventual form. These experiences of being within a particular place reveal another kind of space, at a distance and in relation. Image and action relate to each other as part of what is—where the action of the image and action in general are closely intertwined.
Thérèse Mastroiacovo has a BFA in Sculpture and Photography from York University and an MFA in Open Media from Concordia University. Her work is about art as an idea, artistic process as methodology, and the precarious relationship art has to its own definition, open, half open, or slightly open for re-classification at any given time. With a focus on performative documents, she draws out self-perpetuating systems, creating a space of potential in the middle of preexisting structures. A succession of variable constants raises the question of where a work ends or how it continues.
Thérèse and Sarah also both teach drawing at Concordia. As part-time faculty they are part of a concurrent activity that happens within and outside the university. They also share a studio together (amongst other things) and spend much of their time talking about and working through the many variant forms of drawing. They live and work in Montréal.
Thinking again and supposing with Sarah Greig and Thérèse Mastroiacovo. This project is a process for us to reflect on and inquire into the mechanisms of working together, circulating thoughts, relationality, and giving materiality to a common project.
Greig and Mastroiacovo have accompanied each other in art practice. They both work in a form of conceptual drawing, a kind of process drawing: drawing as doing, as recording, in the present and over time. With a focus on the processes and intentions of artworks, the doing of it more than the end result, this shared way is manifest differently in practice. A dynamic based on the circulation of idea and on distancing. On one side to tussle and spar with the apparatus of art, and on the other, to consider and propose ways of inhabiting it.
I imagine the experience of the visitor as a series of open statements that may enable the process of thinking again, for myself, a curator who has worked in the space of the gallery—the one Sarah and Thérèse are now inhabiting—over many years with a particular attention to context, the conditions of display, and the discourse of the exhibition. At this point in time, the layers of succeeding exhibitions, of works, of layout and display strategies is thick and dense. The references that emanate from the porous layers inflect my relationship with their work and their particular relationship to this space and its history.
Underlying the process of work and the shaping of what the visitor can experience is a stance fully embraced by artists and curator in relation to artmaking in our time, to what is the outcome of a practice, to what motivates its realization. It’s not so much about outrightly claiming, affirming, naming, and revealing, as it is a discreet form of queering of the system in place, arising through the reluctance, if not the refusal of the prevailing conditions and demands of the art world.
MT, SG, TM