SIGHTINGS 16: ‘A new conceptual approach’

Now’s your chance to see a money tree — or pachira aquatica, in Latin — next to a Madagascar dragon tree.

Terrarium, the current edition of the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s SIGHTINGS satellite exhibition program, will be on display until May 22, 2016, on the ground floor of Concordia’s Henry F. Hall Building.

Launched in 2012 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Ellen Art Gallery’s permanent collection, the SIGHTINGS satellite exhibition program was conceived as an experimental platform to critically reflect upon the possibilities and limitations of the modernist “white cube.”

Terrarium: 'A strange form of utopia'

The current edition, SIGHTINGS 16: Terrarium, displays artist Catherine Lescarbeau’s curated collection of Concordia’s indoor plant species.

Here, Katrie Chagnon, Max Stern Curator of Research at the Ellen Art Gallery, introduces SIGHTINGS 16.

What does the spectator encounter when they come upon Terrarium? 

KC: Terrarium displays a collection of indoor plants found in the public spaces and offices of Concordia. This collection is the result of on-site fieldwork by artist Catherine Lescarbeau, who explored both campuses in search of what she considers “residues” of the natural world in the institution, suggesting a “strange form of utopia” that exists inside corporate and institutional spaces such as universities, museums and other structured workspaces.

The university plants have been displayed inside the cube to create a terrarium similar to the presentation structures that one can see, for example, in botanical gardens or museums of natural science or natural history. Like the rooms at the Biodôme, which allow visitors to observe the “biotype” of some natural environments where animals and plants live, this terrarium presents the “biotype” of the university ecosystem where students, faculty and staff live and work. 
 

How does Terrarium answer the SIGHTINGS mandate?

From the beginning, SIGHTINGS was conceived by the previous Max Stern curator, Mélanie Rainville, as an experimental platform to critically reflect upon the possibilities and limitations of the modernist “white cube,” conceived as an ideologically charged supposedly neutral space.

Thus, the basic mandate of SIGHTINGS is to explore new strategies to use the exhibition space in order to question its structure. By literally rendering the walls of the exhibition space transparent, SIGHTINGS reverses the hermetic logic of the white cube, and, in doing so, invites us to expose the invisible mechanisms that condition the production and dissemination of art.

When I started working at the gallery about a year ago, I became responsible for this satellite exhibition program and I decided to re-frame the project around more specific issues, based on annual themes. For 2015-16, I wanted to address a subject of particular importance to the art world in this time of austerity: namely, work and labour. 

This topic relates to a diverse array of issues, including the division of labour (between manual and intellectual work, concept and execution, creation and discursive production), the power relations and dynamics of exploitation involved in the production and distribution of art, recourse to outsourcing, the free flow of knowledge, skill sharing among the many actors in the art milieu, as well as the presence of art in workspaces.

From this perspective, Terrarium responds perfectly to the general as well as to the specific mandate of SIGHTINGS: it proposes a new conceptual approach to the exhibition space, comparing it to a terrarium, and it addresses the topic of work through the role of plants in workspaces, which in a sense can be compared to the role of artwork in offices.

What kind of introspection do you hope the piece inspires? 

I hope this piece will generate critical thinking on how indoor plants — that we take for granted and stop seeing — become a cultural object that shapes the way we interact with the academic institution as a domesticated and controlled environment.

I also hope that Terrarium will make visitors more aware of the paradoxical and more or less invisible presence of this exotic nature within the university, and that it will bring them to question the role that this presence plays in such an institutional space. From this perspective, we can ask ourselves, “What is the difference between a plant and a work of art when they are displayed in offices to make these workplaces more ‘beautiful’ and comfortable?”  

What was SIGHTINGS 15 like? Was it very different from SIGHTINGS 16?

Terrarium is quite different from the previous project, SIGHTINGS 15, proposed by La calq and entitled The Names of Dancers (this is swallowed by neoliberalism or else fades into obscurity). For The Names of Dancers, the site-specific interventions were dance performances happening twice a week in the space surrounding the cube for the eight-week duration of the project.

This time, the intervention was made before the installation in the form of a research project on site. The exhibition is “site specific” because all of its components (plants) have been moved from the university spaces to the box.

Check out SIGHTINGS 16: Terrarium on the ground floor of the Henry F. Hall Building (1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.) until May 22, and keep up to date on what’s happening at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery.