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.
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:
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.
The exhibition “Crépuscule Blanc” took place at the print studio and gallery space Presse Papier in Trois Rivières, Québec in early 2021. It featured mixed media printmaking and drawings on found satellite dishes.
The prints depict the cover and spreads from a fictional issue of an outdated TV Guide-type magazine. The series of satellite dishes show origin stories and narratives about the self as if received from afar.
The audio drama “Sound Research of China” (Michael EDDY, KANG He, 李增辉 LI Zenghui) is composed of episodes from research into the makeup of the sound environment of Beijing. The process consisted of many outings as a group into the streets of Beijing and following and questioning the sounds that we identified as “characteristic” of life in China, and of the relation of sound to life there. Working as a unit of three “specialists,” each of our backgrounds informing our manner of recording, analyzing and editing the source materials, we pursued the sounds in various ways to see how they might compose their own narrative and drama.
_______
“Sound Research of China” was a component of Vitamin Creative Space‘s participation and resulting in the installation in the “Structural Integrity” project in Melbourne’s Meat Market for the Next Wave festival.
Knowles Eddy Knowles’ sculpture “the Holding Environment, v. 2” hosting the audio series “Sound Research of China” as well as a video by Chinese artist Zhou Tao, within the Vitamin Creative Space exhibit in the Next Wave Festival.
Je Suis was my first large scale solo exhibition. It opened at the Fonderie Darling on February 28th, 2020, went on pause after two weeks because of the Covid 19 pandemic, reopened in July, then closed for good at the end of August 2020.
This exhibition gathered together several threads of work that I had been pursuing since moving to Montreal.
First, a series of large Styrofoam engravings on Tyvek paper were arranged around the space, mounted on nylon strapping stretched across metal frames.
The second thread was a number of leather figures scattered in the negative spaces of the print installation, as well as interacting with parts of the installation. These figures, called “armchair participants” had been made of leather from discarded couches found throughout the city. Two of them were still attached to chairs.
The third thread was three videos in different parts of the space. One of them was a wall projection of the video Infinite Cruelty, for nothing(2016), viewable from a cluster of foldable leather camp chairs. Extremities (2020) is a three-channel video that was shown on plasma screens inside of a suspended black box, held up by a pair of armchair participants. Each of the video’s three screens is the perspective of one particular still camera: pinhole, 35 mm and digital SLR. They interact in intimate and sexualized ways, as whispering voices discuss whether and how to make a hidden free space into a public life. Coercion (2020) was projected from the mouth of an armchair participant. This video was made from my grandfather’s super-8 mm films that he had shot from the 1930s to the 1960s. I extracted all the moments I could find where someone was being manipulated for the camera by another person, or by the camera itself.
These three threads reflected different modes of publicness or disguise, within an overall motif of freedom of expression. The rough aesthetic of the prints’ overt and pedantic quality (to my mind) recalls medieval wood cuts but also populist printmaking and editorial cartoons. The show’s title indeed refers to the campaign of solidarity following the 2015 murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris. In a local context, the installation was informed by Quebec’s adoption of Bill 21, which ostensibly promotes secularism by “prohibit[ing] certain persons from wearing religious symbols while exercising their functions.” The means and uses of the body for expressing one’s place in society was a recurrent theme among the prints.
The videos, on the other hand, played with the tension between disguise and identity, where narratives of freedom and agency are found in situations of dissemblance and role play.
In my thinking, the leather armchair participants took on a sort of an intermediary role between the videos and the prints, bridges between self-representation in society, and the internal questions about who we actually are. They obviously reference particular sexual subcultures, but they are also skins to try on, viewpoints to adopt vicariously; or protective suits, almost post-apocalyptic.
The third edition of Credos took place on August 29th, 2020 as part of Art in the Open in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and supported by Verticale. It featured the work of Lea Cetera, Michael Eddy, Cliff Eyland, Michael Fernandes & Craig Leonard, Mina Hedayat, Asako Iwama & Derrick Wang and Sean Lynch.
Credos is an ongoing exploration into the spiritual searching that emerges through artistic practices. It began as a series of tabletop presentations of art works and discussions in church bazaars in Laval, Quebec. The invited participants are artists and writers whose work has engaged with belief in various ways, many of whom have dealt with their own personal experiences of organized religions, without staging a rejection or a celebration. Rather, there is a translation process involved.
This edition also featured Credos Radio, an accompanying live 8-hour radio program, playing on a speaker as part of the installation in the plaza next to the Confederation Centre, as well as streaming online.
