The ArtLab’s POP-UP exhibition series presents the traces of research and creative projects carried out by Bishop’s University’s student body and faculty, as well as by other groups and members of the Sherbrooke community. Following the principles of community-based museology and micromuseology, these ephemeral art events are often collective, participatory and of an experimental nature.

Scroll down to view a virtual translation of the exhibitions part of the POP-UP series, initially displayed in the hallway vitrines of the Foreman Art Gallery.

POP-UP EXHIBITION #7 | Museums & Communities – Practical Art Hive Project

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.

POP-UP EXHIBITION #6 | Weathered Souls and Fleeting Moments

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.

POP-UP EXHIBITION #5 | Exodus

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

POP-UP EXHIBITION #4 | Adaptations

VITRINE INSTALLATION

April 28 to July 9, 2022

TEAMS

Echinodermata
Heavyn-Leigh Martin
Tanya O’Reilly
Daphné Courtès
Hannah McCarthy
Thomas Melnyk
Fine Arts Student: Marilyn Leduc

Chaetognatha

Emma Wright
Kelsie Morris
Leo Chadwick
Josh Norby
Fine Arts Student: Isadora Alcindor

Nemertea
Felix Flax
Jessalynn Hill
Kéliane Nadeau
Anne-Marie Viens-Larin
Fine Arts Student: Marie-Pierre Ranger

Mollusca
Gabrielle Bourbeau
Justin Henry
Stephanie Leclerc
Kaesha Maheu-Raymond
Fine Arts Student: Océane Dessurault-Opalewski

Ctenophora
Claudia Munafo
Elizabeth Leger
Leah Chaulk
Tricia Del Campo
Jared Sparr
Fine Arts Student: Madj Shammas

In a collaborative exercise combining arts and science, the creative speculative invertebrate zoology project Adaptations propels us forward 200 million years, to a time when all vertebrates have been eliminated from the planet and various lineages of aquatic invertebrates have moved onto land to occupy most of the terrestrial ecological niches. Using a current group of aquatic invertebrates as a starting point, teams of biology students were asked to imagine the anatomical, physiological and behavioral adaptations that would allow their descendants to face the main challenges of life on Earth such as gravity, gas exchange, reproduction, food acquisition, temperature regulation, etc.

For their part, five Fine Arts students had to create visual supports to support the description of the different adaptations created for each new species. They were free to create whatever they thought was appropriate to represent the creature assigned to their team.

Isadora Alcindor-Limoges, ArtLab’s Cultural Mediation Intern

POP-UP EXHIBITION #3 | Mirage

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 four 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 Fore-man Art Gallery, to learn more about their vision and try to dispel the mirage.

Isadora Alcindor-Limoges, ArtLab Cultural Mediation Intern

POP-UP EXHIBITION #2 | Cultures croisées 2020-21 : l’art, la terre, et les racines

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)

L’art, la terre et les racines is an artistic residency project initiated by the Maison des Arts St-Laurent in Compton. The project aims to initiate a dialogue between four artists, established or immigrants from the region, and four agricultural producers from the Coaticook region who have welcomed them on their farm for a year.

This POP-UP exhibition presents traces of the creative process of a collective formed by students and a professor of Fine Arts from Bishop’s University, who undertook a residency with the Ferme les Broussailles, located in Martinville. The works created during this residency are grouped in an exhibition presented at the Maison des Arts St-Laurent from September 24 to October 11, 2021.

POP-UP EXHIBITION #1 | Second Sight

VITRINE INSTALLATION

March 31 to April 17, 2021

PARTICIPANTS

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

This first POP-UP exhibition presents a series of sketchbooks, each representing the creative process of an artist participating in this year’s Fine Arts Graduating Student’s Exhibition. These pages bring you into the artists thoughts in imagery and calculations, moving from ideas and concepts to finally arrive to the results displayed in the exhibition Intuition.

Their own intuitions were tested on paper through experimentations and thoughtful creations. Observe how they followed their gut feelings and developped their conscious thoughts in the process of making the artworks presented inside the gallery.

Lily Rousseau, ArtLab Cultural Mediation Intern