EXPANDING EXHIBITIONS RESIDENCY
At the Table, Otherwise

Concept, research, texts, web design: Maxime Pigeon and Megan Quigley
Editing: Ed Janzen, Robin Simpson, Michèle Thériault
Translation (French): Nathalie de Blois

Expanding Exhibitions is a residency at the Gallery over a period of four months that gives the opportunity to two recent graduates in art history and in design and computation arts to develop a digital research project that mines the Gallery’s exhibition and curatorial history. The duo of young researchers identify in the Ellen’s archives one or two exhibitions from which a critical reflection is given shape on a digital platform.

Maxime Pigeon (Design and Computation Arts) and Megan Quigley (Art History) are the participants in this third and final residency that took place in the fall of 2022.

At the Table, Otherwise is a web-based project by Maxime Pigeon and Megan Quigley that expands on the exhibition Qui parle ? / Who Speaks?, presented at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in 2018. Curated by Katrie Chagnon, then Max Stern Curator of Research and Collection, Qui parle ? / Who Speaks? brought together recently acquired art works that interrogated the authorial voice and speaking subject. Distinct to this exhibition was the inclusion of material documenting the process behind the acquisition of the works.

Intrigued by this view into the labour and voices behind the exhibition, and the status of these documents as presented within the gallery, Pigeon and Quigley’s project transposes the exhibition’s print archive online, adding to it the annotations and keywords that arose from their guiding questions: what are the implications of the exhibition archive as a map of labour? How might our orientation to these documents lead us toward new trajectories of inquiry and understanding? How do archives “speak”?

The third and last Expanding Exhibition residency in the cycle was made possible through the generosity of Reesa Greenberg in partnership with Concordia University’s Departments of Art History and of Design and Computations Arts.

MUMTALAKAT ممتلكات

Mumtalakat concept and research: Emma Haraké
Interviewees: Malaka Ackaoui, Sawsan AlSaraf, Aicha Annaoui, Wissam Assouad, M.B., Amina Jalabi, Maher Kouraytem, Farah Mustafa
Essays: Hoda Adra, Abeer Esber, May Telmissany
Editing: Emma Haraké, Robin Simpson, Michèle Thériault
Translation: Arabic to English: Emma Haraké, Lynn Kodeih; Arabic to French: Chirine Chamsine, Lynn Kodeih; English to French: Hoda Adra, Lynn Kodeih, Bernard Schütze; French to Arabic: Zaki Mahfoud; French to English: Bernard Schütze
Transcription: Basheer Amin, Emma Haraké
Video: Vitalyi Bulychev
Design: DJÖYN

Meaning possessions in Arabic, Mumtalakat centers on eight interviews between Emma Haraké and local Arabic speakers invited to reflect on their migration experience through a selection of personal objects that accompanied them. Alongside these testimonies are images of their objects, critical texts by Hoda Adra, Abeer Esber, and May Telmissany exploring questions of displacement, language, and oral history, an introduction by Haraké, a bibliography, and interview transcriptions. Designed by DJÖYN, Mumtalakat has been developed for close listening and reading on desktop and mobile browsers, and all text content is available in Arabic, French, and English.

Mumtalakat is the culmination of a collaboration between the Ellen Art Gallery and Emma Haraké, commencing in 2017 with exhibition tours in Arabic, followed in 2019 by an exhibition in the Gallery of an initial five interviews, and a series of participatory workshops and events between ending in 2022.

EXPANDING EXHIBITIONS RESIDENCY
Rules of Extraction

Concept, research, text, design, code: Madelyn Capozzi et Joëlle Dubé
Editing: Ed Janzen, Julia Eilers Smith, Robin Simpson and Michèle Thériault
Translation (French): Catherine Barnabé and Joëlle Dubé
3D modelling: Jean-François Robin
Consultation: Patrick Capozzi

Expanding Exhibitions is a residency at the Gallery over a period of four months that gives the opportunity to two recent graduates in art history and in design and computation arts to develop a digital research project that mines the Gallery’s exhibition and curatorial history. The duo of young researchers identify in the Ellen’s archives one or two exhibitions from which a critical reflection is given shape on a digital platform.

Madelyn Capozzi (Design and Computation Arts) and Joëlle Dubé (Art History) are the participants in this second residency that took place in the winter 2021.

Rules of Extraction is a web-based project by Joëlle Dubé and Maddy Capozzi that expands on the exhibition World of Matter: Exposing Resource Ecologies, presented at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in 2015. World of Matter investigates the complex ecologies of primary materials through a series of exhibitions, events, publications and a multimedia platform.

Their project builds on the exhibition’s approaches and issues through a methodology that ‘thinks with water’ and invokes Gayatri Spivak’s notion of planetarity to unpack the extraction and dispossession perpetuated by Canadian mining companies both at home and abroad, with a critical focus on the complex rules and norms upon which these extractions are built. These rules and norms reveal how various ways of relating to more than human worlds are enshrined in law and embodied in practice.

The second Expanding Exhibition residency was made possible through the generosity of Reesa Greenberg in partnership with Concordia University’s Departments of Art History and of Design and Computations Arts.

EXPANDING EXHIBITIONS RESIDENCY
Establishing a Database Connection

Concept, research and text: Gavin Park and Kristina Vannan
Design and programming:  Gavin Park, Kristina Vannan assisted by Conan Lai
Editing: Ed Janzen (English)
Translation (French): Catherine Barnabé
Consultation: Christopher Moore, Sabine Rosenberg

Expanding Exhibitions is a residency at the Gallery over a period of four months that gives the opportunity to two recent graduates in art history and in design and computation arts to develop a digital research project that mines the Gallery’s exhibition and curatorial history.  The duo of young researchers identify in the Ellen’s archives one or two exhibitions from which a critical reflection is given shape on a digital platform.

Gavin Park (Design and Computation Arts) and Kristina Vanna (Art History) are the participants in this inaugural residency.

Part exhibition framework experimentation, part interface design interrogation, Establishing a Database Connection investigates how the digital file database of the Leonard & Bina Ellen (LBE) Gallery’s collection can be activated beyond the pure intention of data preservation and storage.  In this inaugural project the residents Gavin Park and Kristina Vannan, sought to introduce a digital counterpart to the methods explored in the 2009 LBE exhibition As Much As Possible Given The Time And Space Allotted (AMAP). In this exhibition, curators Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross explored ways “to systematically remove as many artworks as possible from the LBE Gallery storage vault and […] [be] sequentially installed in the exhibition area using all spaces available.” Ten years after AMAP took place, this project critically reconsiders how this type of performative gesture can be enacted through the LBE Gallery’s digitized collection database. With an unexpected interface design stripped of conventional methods of search and navigation, Establishing a Database Connection enables its visitors to build spatial, relational constellations or lattices of connections between LBE collection artworks. These networks become a reflection on the narratives that can emerge, are implied, or the ones which are missing  – ultimately affecting one’s perception of, or connection to, the collection as a whole.

The Expanding Exhibition Residency was made possible through the generosity of Reesa Greenberg in partnership with the Departments of Art History and of Design and Computations Arts.

Anne Savage: A Latent Collection

Anne Savage at her desk at Baron Byng, c. 1940, Anne Savage Fonds, Concordia University Archives, file P146-06-01.7.

Concept, research, and texts: Katrie Chagnon and Elisabeth Otto
Research assistance: Claire Embree-Lalonde
Translation: Simon Brown (English) / Catherine Barnabé (French)
Editing: Edwin Janzen
Graphic design: Karine Cossette
Programming: Croustille

Anne Savage: A Latent Collection is a project stemming from our examination of the large number of works by Canadian artist and pedagogue Anne Savage (1896–1971) held in Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s permanent collection. This body of work, composed essentially of sketches, drawings and painted panels donated between 1963 and 2001, is both the most substantial monographic grouping of works within the Gallery’s collection and the greatest number of works by Savage held at a single institution. However, while it has been exhibited several times at Concordia since the late 1960s, this body of work remains largely “latent,” in the sense that it has not yet truly been the subject of an in-depth critical examination encompassing its complex socio-historical, cultural and political implications.

Katrie Chagnon and Elisabeth Otto examined approximately eight hundred of Savage’s works held in the Gallery’s collection, as well as her personal archives with the goal of understanding how Savage’s practice as a female artist and educator interacted with the discursive, social, cultural and ideological structures specific to her era, such as colonialism, nationalism, and the professionalization of the artist. Privileging feminist and decolonial methodologies, deployed in parallel with historiographical approaches and formal analysis, this partial rereading of Savage’s oeuvre focuses on certain important elements of her artistic and professional career that highlight her somewhat ambiguous position within a complex network of relationships, discourses, and institutions.

Collecting. The Inflections of a Practice.

Curating: Mélanie Rainville
Translation: Cory McAdam, Donald McGrath
Editing: Jo-Anne Balcaen, Marina Polosa
Photographs: Paul Litherland, Paul Smith,
Richard-Max Tremblay
Graphic design: Uniform