VITRINE INSTALLATION

May 2 to July 5, 2025

PARTICIPANT

Majd Shammas

Winglessness is an exhibit showcasing the creative process of Sherbrooke-based, Syrian-born artist Majd Shammas. His work delves into the lived experiences of refugees fleeing on foot, shaped by the violence of war, displacement, and the invisible borders that restrict freedom. Through sketches, models, photographs, and evolving ideas, this exhibit offers an intimate look into both his past projects and his current artistic inquiries.

The title, Winglessness, was chosen by the artist to reflect the limitations imposed on bodies in movement, a metaphor for the weight of citizenship, race, and political exclusion. Without wings, there is no flight; there is only the ground, the barrier, the checkpoint. In his more recent work, Shammas reimagines winglessness not just as a state of limitation, but as a form of punishment. In contrast, winglessness becomes a courageous act—an intentional surrender of privilege, it becomes a rebellious feature.

Throughout the exhibit, Shammas’s creative process unfolds in four thematic display cases. The first features sketched and sculpted cushions, symbolizing the tension between comfort and displacement. The second showcases source photographs and cut-outs used in his charcoal portraits, highlighting the paradox of seeking individuality while unintentionally numbering his subjects — a poetic critique of how refugee stories are reduced to statistics.

The third case captures a moment of creative exploration, where collages of fallen angels and colored paper mark a shift toward myth and metaphor. Finally, the fourth presents a faceless angel, surrounded by fragmented studies of body parts and Arabic writing translating to “the fall of the angels”.

Winglessness is not just an exhibit of artworks. It is a living archive of Majd Shammas’s creative process, offering insight into how artistic meaning evolves.

Jamie Pagé – Student Curator

VITRINE INSTALLATION

January 17 to March 29, 2025

PARTICIPANTS

Faustine Escoffier & François Lapierre

The First Supper project is informed by research on sustainable food systems in Canada led by Dr. Vivian Valencia, Dr. Julia Ros-Cuellar and Dr. Bryan Dale as part of the Lighthouse Lab. The First Supper symbolizes the inaugural meal of our aspirational future: a world in which food systems are sustainable, just and equitable. Bringing together science, art, and community, and mobilizing regional actors, this project seeks to find sustainable solutions within planetary limits and, most importantly, to create hope for a better future.

In September 2024, a visioning workshop provided an opportunity to collectively think about “new” agri-food systems. Based on the postulate that there is a consensus that the existing food system has failed, farmers, academics, students, food industry and agricultural professionals, and artists were invited to reflect on existing alternatives that could serve as lighthouses, as well as to imagine creative ideas for the future. Escoffier and Lapierre then created their own works inspired by the narratives developed during the exercise.

Lapierre, illustrator, painter, screenwriter, colorist, and author of children’s books, plays with the science fiction universe and, with a nod to Marvel’s Fantastic Four superheroes, created the four Chevaliers du Changement [Knights of Change]. With their humanoid form and various symbols, their mission is to carry the vision imagined by the four groups formed during the workshop. Drawing playfully on popular culture and placing the human being at the center of his message, Lapierre reminds us that only human intervention will ensure the changes we seek by 2050. A date that, not so long ago, seemed very far away.

A fine arts graduate of Bishop’s University with a passion for creating her own artistic materials, Escoffier ventured into the production of two handmade papers that conceptualize the thoughts evoked during the visioning workshop. Using vegetables and fruit harvested at the Bishop’s University Educational Farm and Les Hôtes Épinettes Farm, she created one paper with local and edible produce. The second paper includes nettle seeds, an edible and medicinal plant often considered a weed. Motivated by a desire to deconstruct beliefs in order to explore new ones, Escoffier proposes a horizontal approach to the living, based on wild gathering, herbalism and energy sobriety.

In the display cases, Escoffier’s plant fiber papers, Lapierre’s illustrations, milkweed seeds, kale seeds, oak acorns, and potting soil are interwoven with words named during the visioning workshop, words that embody the utopias of those who dream of feeding ourselves differently.

Gratitude is extended to the Office of Alumni Relations and Philanthropy for its generous support of the two artists.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

October 18 to December 14, 2024

PARTICIPANT

Chloé Larivière

Chloé Larivière is a graduate from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi in Outdoor Intervention and is currently studying Fine Arts at Bishop’s University. She is supported by the Haystack Opportunity Fund 2023-2024, awarded by the Fine Arts Department of Bishop’s University, which allowed her to study at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Maine, USA) during the summer of 2024.

Her outdoor experiences influence her artistic work and vice versa. Focusing on the observation of landscapes and the discovery of unknown and inaccessible territories in groups, Chloé Larivière’s research explores notions of ecology and friendship. Through her expeditions, she revisits the romantic persona of the artist in nature. In fact, her relationship to the creative process is akin to that of the scientific method, where stages of study, testing, and experimentation precede the final artwork. Moving away from a discourse of environmental awareness or education, she captures, notebook in hand, the wonder, grandeur, and vulnerability of distant lands. Her work also portrays her friends in sometimes hostile environments. This reinforces the need for solidarity and underlines the instinctive energy of a collective in a context of surpassing oneself.

Two pop-up windows are dedicated to the artist’s book Entre les deux. Halfway between a photo album and a travel diary, this book presents the artist and her friends during an outdoor expedition in the Yukon, in 2023. With the goal of descending the Tatshenshini River and finding ski lines, the group traveled all the way to the Gulf of Alaska. The other two vitrines contain watercolors created on the spot in the wild, studies and documentation of watercolors that were offered to friends on another adventure at Lac Saint-Jean in the year 2024.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

September 6 to October 5, 2024

PARTICIPANT

Anna Izmaylova

Sitting at her desk in the Accounting Department at Bishop’s University, Anna Izmaylova scans both screens of her computer. Among the many Excel sheets open, one window stands out: the online catalog of the University’s Permanent Art Collection. The colorful images contrast with the lines and numbers of the other documents. Portraits are presented, using a variety of techniques. Those of one artist in particular catch her eye. The prints by Canadian Jewish sculptor, photographer, and printmaker Stanley Lewis (1930-2006).

The titles of the works (Evolution, Facing the Unknown and Towards the Infinite) and the expressions of the portrayed figures captivate her attention. Once in the university archives, Merrylou Smith, the head of the archives and permanent collection, hands her a box containing Lewis’s prints and press kit. Her encounter with the material reaffirmed her choice. In contact with the papers and ink, Anna perceived the works as alive. So begins her connection with Lewis’s visual world, and the exploration of how these prints resonate with her.

The Connections series, originally initiated in 2006 by Vicky Chainey Gagnon at the Foreman Art Gallery and relaunched in 2023 by the ArLab, aims to make the University Art Collection come alive through the insight of Bishop’s University staff, faculty and students who are invited to describe their “connection” to the artworks of their choice. The University Art Collection becomes a site for fresh, new experiences through personal testimony and perspectives.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

April 26 to July 13, 2024

PARTICIPANT

Shirin Abbasi

La maison est noire exhibits the research and creative process involved in the realization of the artwork Fuite by Iranian-born emerging Sherbrooke artist Shirin Abbasi. This work is closely linked to the Women, Life, Freedom movement, triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, at the hands of the Iranian vice-police in September 2022.

The exhibition traces the artist’s quest for identity, revived by these events, both as a member of the diaspora and as a woman. Through her work in performance art, which integrates drawing within her relationship with architecture, Shirin Abbasi revisits the social context in which the demonstrations took place, as well as her own connection to the country. She reveals with authenticity the feeling of oppression and the omnipresence of death in her imagination and in the Iranian collective imagination.

The title La maison est noire refers to a documentary film by Iranian poet and director Forugh Farokhzad, which inspired one of Shirin Abbasi’s performances following the September 2022 protests. It also evokes the thoughts of the artist, an architectural graduate, on domestic living spaces and how to inhabit them intimately, bodily.

An iteration of Fuite is on show at the Maison des arts et de la culture de Brompton in Sherbrooke until May 12, 2024. La maison est noire is intended as a dialogue with this exhibition, providing access to the artist’s path and the questioning that underlies her research.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

January 18 to March 23, 2024

PARTICIPANTS

Matéo Cambolive, Wishah Mahmood, Jada Milks, Jamie Pagé, Cloé Ricard & Paul Trapp

For the 11th exhibition in its Pop-Up series, the ArtLab invited the BU Arts Festival team from Bishop’s University to examine the creative and organizational process behind its annual event. The team therefore engaged in an exercise of self-observation of its operating modes and the historical evolution of the project, which resulted in the collective production of several archives.

The BU Arts Festival is a student-led, multidisciplinary arts event overseen by the Arts Administration Department. It was created to ensure the longevity of artistic culture at the university and takes place over the course of a week on and around campus. The program includes workshops, lectures, performances, classes, competitions, parties, exhibitions, concerts, film screenings, etc. of different artistic styles and currents.

With the intention of making visible the behind-the-scenes and structures that support the festival, this exhibition explores the complexity of human relationships, the ecosystems that are created, the interdependencies that arise, and how commitment, passion and attachments play a role in driving such an event. The vitrines feature an organization chart reflecting the interconnection between people and entities involved, testimonials from team members, the transformation of the visual identity over time, and a representation of the festival’s annual creative cycle. Through the shaping of a collective and changing thought, this exhibition opens onto the festival, at the core of preparations for the next edition, which will take place in the spring of 2024.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

October 27 to December 9, 2023

PARTICIPANTS

Simon Nguyen

ArtLab presents Nation-States and Alien-Nations by Simon Nguyen, Liberal Arts and International Political Economy student at Bishop’s University. This exhibition, produced as part of the student-artist residency offered in partnership with Literacy in Action’s Migratory Roots festival, reveals the traces of a writing project focused on themes of migration, displacement, belonging, non-belonging and identity. Through conversations, shared reflections, and time spent dwelling on issues that, in everyday life, occupy a peripheral space in his preoccupations, Simon Nguyen develops a research and creative process centered on his personal history and trajectory as a second-generation immigrant of Vietnamese origin.

Through a critical eye and a form of lucidity tinged with self-mockery, Simon Nguyen revisits the ethno-cultural characteristics of a nation in which he has never lived, and from which he has inherited a memory out of phase with time, obsolete and burdened with a past that seems forgotten. He also examines the difficulty (indeed, the impossibility) of attaching himself to a narrative of integration into Quebec society, even though he was born here and has known no other. Questioning the gap between the official discourse of multiculturalism and what is conveyed by the media, he explores a feeling of not really existing as an Asian person of color because of not seeing himself reflected anywhere. Nowhere outside his own being.

Extracts from his logbook, poems, photographs, passages from significant readings and transcripts of conversations make up the archival corpus that captures an authentic, evolving thought.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

September 7 to October 7, 2023

PARTICIPANTS

Gentiane Bélanger

The ArtLab is delighted to re-launch the Connections series, which was originally initiated in 2006 by Vicky Chainey Gagnon at the Foreman Art Gallery. The aim of this project is to make the University Art Collection come alive through the insight of Bishop’s University staff, faculty and students who are invited to describe their “connection” to the artworks of their choice. The University Art Collection becomes a site for fresh, new experiences through personal testimony and perspectives.

For this new iteration of Connections, Gentiane Bélanger, current Director and Curator of the Foreman Art Gallery, invites us to discover or rediscover the work of Kay Kinsman (1909-1998). She traces the unconventional career of this American artist, who lived in Lennoxville in the 1980s, and who stood out for her remarkable intellectual and artistic freedom. Gentiane Bélanger also underlines the important role played by art historian Monique Nadeau-Saumier, both in the public recognition of Kay Kinsman’s practice, and as a role model for herself as an art historian.

Through Kay Kinsman’s work, this Pop-Up exhibition explores the threads of filiation between three generations of women active in the regional arts context