Eli Bjedov-Stanković & María Andreína Escalona De Abreu
[Untitled Outdoor Paper Project],
2024
Eli Bjedov-Stanković, Closing the Garden (an archive), ongoing-2022, handmade paper (Solomon’s Seal, raštika cabbage, comfrey, abaca, dried maple), natural dye (madder root), beeswax, wasp nest, ceramic, soil, cotton, wood, variable dimensions. Photo by Sarah Bertrand-Hamel.
Project description
[Untitled Outdoor Paper Project] is an exploratory, collaborative work by Eli Bjedov-Stanković and María Andreína Escalona De Abreu. This paper-based work is an installation that wishes to exist outside, to escape the confines of the gallery and its role as paperwork, and to bathe in the sun and be affected by the elements. The work will go through all the stages of creation during the run of the exhibition allowing visitors to witness the process. Leftover paperwork from the gallery and old clothes will be transformed into pulp, which the artists will use to make new paper. The paper will then be treated with the Japanese technique of momigami, making it resistant to water and wind. The pieces will be sewn together into a large banner that can live outside, in the Gallery’s courtyard.
Flirting with performance, this work uses the gallery as a studio, bringing the labour of artistic creation to the forefront; an experiment that brings ideas and techniques untested by the artists into the exhibition. In this way, the work is a celebration of the collaborative and community-oriented nature of papermaking.
About paper_work.doc
Both a temporary studio space and an evolving artwork, paper_office.doc is a collaboration bringing together curatorial, artistic, and technical creation. In it, we embrace the many hats that we, as cultural workers, must wear to maintain a viable practice. We ask ourselves: If we were to materialize the work behind an exhibition, how many sheets of paperwork would we stack? What are the tasks and roles that weigh over us? How can we apply curatorial methodology to artmaking and vice versa? Is the grass growing in our filing cabinets a metaphorical seed for more ethical ways of working or neglected archives and unfiled paperwork perhaps? It might be just a greener addition to our workspace.
Disguised as an office cubicle, our installation attempts to address these questions and proposes a creative use of the materials found in our personal studios, the gallery’s inventory, Concordia’s hallways, or borrowed from other facilities. Above the cubicle/studio, stacks of freshly made paperwork hang above our heads; some are offerings for the public, some are soon-to-be piecework for an installation, some are blank pages waiting to archive future projects, and whatever is left will be turned into pulp once again, as the cycle continues.
Office hours of the paper studio: from Wednesdays to Friday, from 2pm to 6pm, (except July 26th, August 16th, and September 6th) the public is invited to join María Andreína Escalona De Abreu to learn about papermaking and the curatorial process as she produces paper sheets to hang above the cubicle.
This exhibition would not have been possible without the support and expertise of Arrien Weeks, Sustainability Technician at Concordia University Centre for Creative Reuse (CUCCR), and the Céline Bureau Residency. Their loan of office supplies, furniture, and building materials has allowed us to build this paper studio using what is at hand, leaving little material impact and opening up possibilities to activate other projects with its components.
paper_office.doc will be extended to the exhibition space at Céline Bureau as part of the curatorial project by María Andreína Escalona De Abreu and Chloë Lalonde in October 2024.
About the artists
Eli Bjedov-Stanković is a papermaker based in Montréal, Canada, completing a BFA in Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University. In both visual art and writing, they are preoccupied with mystery and transformation – the way that material and spirit are continuously cycled through all things and how paper can hold this memory. Materially, they’re a maximalist, focusing on scarcity and abundance in art. Their work questions how we may create abundance from a scarcity of material. They use salvaged, scavenged, and re-transformable materials to explore personal and collective narratives. Working with materials in a circular way, Eli strives to place their work in a cycle, an inaccessible timeline on which everything moves before being recycled into the earth.
Visit Eli's Instagram!
María Andreína Escalona De Abreu is a Venezuelan visual artist, writer, and independent curator based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She obtained a BFA in Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University in 2022 and has since been developing her curatorial practice as FOFA Gallery’s curator in residence as well as Céline Bureau’s Residency Coordinator since January 2024. Escalona's practice brings together curation, collaborative initiatives, creative writing, and textile installations as well as handmade paper. It is through these disciplines that she dreams, confabulates and applies notions of sustainability, community development and advocacy for equity in the arts.
Visit María's Instagram!
