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

VITRINE INSTALLATION

April 5 to July 22, 2023

PARTICIPANTS

Pascal e

The last POP-UP exhibition of the year presents the ongoing research of an emerging artist from the Eastern Townships. In order to learn what is brewing in the studios of local and early career artists, we have asked an emerging artist to put us on the trail of her peers’ projects, those who arouse curiosity and admiration in her.

From April 5 to July 22, 2023, our display cases will host the logbooks, sketches, drawings and writings of multidisciplinary artist Pascal e who proposes ways to “endure the unbearable in order to finally rest” through a poetry of the everyday and a process of self-observation.

In Berce-moi, Pascal e reveals the traces of her creative process in relation to the theme of healing, from early childhood to her most recent explorations. She features imaginary characters such as la yogarette, Marie, Grand-Madame Lune and les cerné-e-s, as well as performative projects of everyday life like the moment collection Pousse, and her current research: the ideation of laboratories and performances of reinvented lullabies. Addressed to adults who are tired, hurt, sick, lost, the lullabies take on a form of militancy for a slowness so hard to find in this exhausting world. “It always ends up passing, they say”.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

January 20 to March 25, 2023

PARTICIPANTS

Laura Bernard, Gésaël Drouin-Vigneault, Elise Grenier, Marie Constance Hountondji, Jamie Pagé, Nana Sani

This exhibit seeks to document a process that is mostly intangible, where human relationships are at the heart of the project and learning to work collaboratively defines its trajectory. Making decisions by consensus, identifying needs and values behind motivations, choosing together to share responsibility in a horizontal way are some of the forms of engagement that inform this micromuseology research.

In the fall of 2022, as part of the course Museums & Communities and in partnership with the ArtLab, six art history students from Bishop’s University developed a project based on the principles of facilitation and operation of an art hive, which aims to build a community through art. This participatory project intended to bring their immediate community together around a creative activity.

The materials on display document the process, including archives of meetings throughout the course, logbooks, photos and samples of the holiday card-making activity that concluded the project.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

October 27 to December 10, 2022

PARTICIPANT

Gabrielle Gagné

Fine Arts student at Bishop’s University Gabrielle Gagné is the recipient of the Haystack Opportunity Fund 2021-2022* which allowed her to attend The Poetry of Paper workshop with paper artist Pam DeLuco at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Maine, USA).

In the summer of 2022, Gabrielle spent two weeks exploring papermaking out of materials recycled or scavenged from the natural environment of the Atlantic coast. Lobster nets, cattails, seaweed, shells, cardboard boxes from nearby studios and discarded matted frames were all part of her experiments.

The artist-student’s background in environmental geography, social work and psychology have led her to develop a specific interest in sites and the human activities that take place there. Her research is rooted in the territory and attempts to reveal a poetry in the gathering, recovery and metamorphosis. 

*This opportunity was awarded by Bishop’s University Fine Arts Department.

VITRINE INSTALLATION

September 16 to October 8, 2022

PARTICIPANT

Tosha Callaway

In 1972, my Anglophone grandmother, her parents, and her eight brothers all emigrated from Quebec and headed west towards Ontario. Having just started a family of their own, my grandparents would spend the next three years on the road, drifting between the homes of relatives, their camper, and nature. Ultimately, they would decide to return to Quebec in 1974, where they would settle to raise my father and eventually my uncle.

This series traces a collection of photographs that my grandmother took throughout these three years. A marriage of collage, painting, and woodworking, this series integrates both the crafts of my grandparents—my grandfather being an avid whittler and my grandmother being a casual photographer and a serial scrapbooker—with my own beloved medium: painting.

Through a series of atypical portraits my grandmother was able to capture not only the fleeting moments of her young parenthood, but the ever shifting locations that would become, to her family, a growing series of temporary homes. Formed by the precarity of these years in my family’s history, my series weaves these memories into my own narrative, planting a new seed for what was once uprooted.

Tosha Callaway, Student-artist

VITRINE INSTALLATION

April 28 to July 9, 2022

TEAMS

VITRINE INSTALLATION

April 6 to 16, 2022

PARTICIPANTS

Tosha Callaway, Majd Shammas, Maïthé Cyr-Morin

A mirage, a gap between two realities.

An idea, an illusion.

Bringing together the work of three Fine Arts graduating students, the exhibition Mirage explores this notion of discrepancy between the artist’s perception and that of the viewer. The POP-UP exhibition presented in the vitrines invites us to explore traces of the creative process of three of the artists exhibited in the Foreman Art Gallery, to learn more about their vision and try to dispel the mirage.

Isadora Alcindor-Limoges, ArtLab Cultural Mediation Intern

VITRINE INSTALLATION

September 9 to October 9, 2021

PARTICIPANTS

Chantal Lafond, Faustine Gruninger and Marie-Pier Ranger (students in Fine Arts), and Regine Neumann (professor in Fine Arts) 

VITRINE INSTALLATION

March 31 to April 17, 2021

PARTICIPANTS

Allister Aitken, Steve Breton, Lara Dion, Francine Ethier, Nicholas Gibbs, Chantal Lafond, Lily Rousseau