Curating – conceptual youth hostel

Club Ami — Les manœuvres de la côte

Over 2022 and into 2023, along with other artists Maude Arès, Damián Birbrier and Adam Kinner, I took part in visits and workshops at Club Ami in preparation for their 40th anniversary exhibition at Maison de la Culture de Côte-des-Neiges. I noticed early on how the staff and members of Club Ami were negotiating around this project with great care and generosity the delicate puzzles of the past and the present, history and urgency, and the tensions around representation. My contribution was the Big Book, a device that could simply function as a series of surfaces to accommodate an archive of old and new work of various members. It was made of repurposed electrical conduits, textiles, caster wheels and wood.

Details below…

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Credos IV

CREDOS IV

Credos IV is a book-as-exhibition, the fourth in an ongoing series of displays of artworks that elaborate on notions of belief (see below). It was launched February 3rd, 2022 at articule artist run centre.
The 5 inch by 8 inch books are 150 pages in black and white with colour inserts. Each comes with handmade hardwood frames, individually covered in textile, which the books can easily slip in and out of (back and front covers offering different choices of image by the painter Mina Hedayat). Credos IV can be hung on a nail or fit on a shelf, and look nice on their own or in clusters. They come in a numbered edition of 200.
With contributions from Lea Cetera, Mina Hedayat, Craig Leonard & Michael Fernandes, Jones Miller, Pak Sheung Chuen, Jeanne Randolph, Alessandro Rolandi, Jamie Ross, and others.
They are priced at $30 and can be found at the following locations, with more distributors forthcoming:

Articule (Montreal)

Art Metropole (Toronto)

Axenéo7 (Gatineau)

Canadian Centre for Architecture bookstore (Montreal)

La Fonderie Darling (Montreal)

Librairie le Port de Tête (Montreal)

Verticale — centre d’artistes (Laval)

Credos is a series of exhibitions that started off as table-top group mini-exhibitions conceived for church-basement bazaars in Laval and Greater Montreal throughout 2019–20. The first two editions took place in different Armenian congregations in Laval. When the COVID-19 pandemic put subsequent Québec editions on hold, a version was transported to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and shown in the frame of the all-day public art festival “Art in the Open” in 2020. An 8-hour online radio program was broadcast alongside the tabletop displays.
Credos IV is also a response to social distance, but at the same time a furthering of an inquiry into the substitutions and translations of an exhibition into non-gallery spaces.

See more about previous editions here.

published Ferbuary 17th, 2022

Credos

This is a project of table top exhibitions held in church bazaars. The invited participants are artists and writers whose work has engaged with belief in various ways. Many of them have dealt with their own personal experiences of organized religions, but without staging a rejection or a celebration. Rather, there is a translation process involved.
The desire to hold these 2- or 3-person table top exhibitions in bazaars stems from a project I had organized with others at HomeShop, which was a series of interventions in the Farmers Market in Beijing called “True and False”. In Montreal, I felt the church bazaars held a similar potential for art works to rub against and settle beside a variety of other value scales. Of course, there are diverse publics, the most basic of types being those who are there for the church and those who show up primarily for the art. However, in either case, the work is discussed and introduced by the presenters, and so a negotiation has already started. There is a plurality of entry points in the selected works, and so interactions over the table can be unpredictable and yet down to earth.

This project remains unfinished. Its first two iterations took place in cooperation with the artist-run centre Verticale in the city of Laval, Québec in November 2019. The next two iterations were planned for April and May 2020, with Verticale again, and with articule artist-run centre. The series has not been cancelled, but is on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Though all art exhibitions, as well as any other social activity, are and will be affected by the outbreak, it seemed poignant to think about the depth of this crisis for religious and spiritual gatherings. Churches and many other places of worship serve an older demographic that is especially vulnerable to the worst of the coronavirus. So it may take a while, or may take a different form, to finally realize this project.

Stay tuned…

The first edition of Credos was held on the first weekend of November 2019 at the Armenian Evangelical Church of Montreal in Laval. On display were:
Opioid Wall Book by Cliff Eyland (drawings)
non-visible by Asako Iwama and Derrick Wang (video)
Stretching Exercises by Michael Fernandes and Craig Leonard (book)

Visitors were invited to contribute a translation of the instruction poetry in Stretching Exercises.

The second edition of Credos was held on the last weekend of November 2019 at the Armenian Community Centre of Laval. On display were:
Earrings by Mina Hedayat (wearable objects)
Painting Hijabs by Mina Hedayat (paintings)
Plant Hijabs by Mina Hedayat (sculpture)
Stretching Exercises by Michael Fernandes and Craig Leonard (book)
A presentation by Michael Eddy on the origins of the Credos project.
A lecture by Vincent Bonin on the work and life of Michel Journiac.

See more at Credos 3

Inhale Exile, Part 2: mein anderer Vater trank Bier auf Ex aus dem Aschenbecher

Exhibited at Husslehof in Frankfurt, DE, and realized in cooperation with Leonhardi Kulturprojekte (2016).

This second iteration of Inhale Exile was subtitled “My other father chugged beer from ashtrays.” It included works and documents by: Michael Fernandes, David Hammons, Gareth James, Leisure (Susannah Wesley, Meredith Carruthers), Lee Lozano, Sean Lynch, Steffanie Ling, Anthony McCall, Daniel Olson, Nick Santos Pedro, Alessandro Rolandi, Lawrence Weiner, Norman Rockwell.

See the web PDF of the second Inhale Exile broadsheet.

Inhale Exile Part 1: The Break

Exhibited at L’escalier, Montreal, CA, from May 21 to July 16, 2016.

This first iteration of the curatorial project Inhale Exile, subtitled “the break,” consists of two parts: an installation in the space of L’escalier, and a screenings of video works punctuating the run of the exhibition. The smoke break and the discourses and speech acts (rumours, counter-histories) produced there are understood as aesthetic potentialities of smoking culture. In institutional contexts, these breaks have engendered reconfigurations of time and space, the sharing of informal comments or opinions, private thoughts in public.

“The break” included works by: Sean Lynch, Leisure (Susannah Wesley, Meredith Carruthers), Michael Fernandes, Gareth James, Roger Quallen, Alessandro Rolandi, Lawrence Weiner*, Philip Guston*, Richard Prince*, Lee Lozano*, Claire Fontaine*, Hans Haacke*, David Hammons* and screenings of videos by Nina Koennemann, Lee Kit, Erik Blinderman, Steve Carr, Knowles Eddy Knowles, Daniel Olson and Christian Boltanski.

See the web PDF of the first Inhale Exile broadsheet.

World Portable Gallery Convention 2012

Exhibition realized in cooperation with Eyelevel Gallery, September 2012.

The World Portable Gallery Convention 2012 was an international convention on portable galleries and alternative spaces hosted by Eyelevel Gallery during the month of September 2012.

Against the backdrop of the construction of a massive $164-million convention centre in downtown Halifax—and therefore a huge emphasis on the economic potentials of convening and networking—the project celebrated the variety of spaces artists and others have initiated with the smallest of means.

Investigations were thereby conducted into topics including scale, autonomy, mobility, intimacy, as well as transitions from alternative to established, and the pathways between DIY and entrepreneur.

For a PDF of the book (size: 80 mb) documenting the project, click here

Smaller-size excerpts:

Introduction
Radical Napkin Theology

For more details on the project, click here

For a specially-edited issue of CTRL+P online journal, click here

Installation view, from left to right: Museum of Mental Objects (Judy Freya Q. Sibayan); Nasubi Gallery (Ozawa Tsuyoshi) showing Ken Lum; background: Gallery Deluxe Gallery (Paul Hammond and Francesca Tallone) showing Chris Foster; foreground: Reduce Art Flights (Gustav Metzger).

DIY MoMO Guidelines for the Museum of Mental Objects.

Nasubi Gallery showing Ken Lum.

Gallery Deluxe Gallery showing Chris Foster’s Convoy.

RAF campaign making appearances across the city.

Installation view, from left to right: Coat of Charms (Hannah Jickling) showing F* Mountain; Nanomuseum (Hans Ulrich Obrist) showing the shop (Vitamin Creative Space) presented by Matt Hope.