Curator Residency 2024
Artists:
Chloë p.f. Lalonde
Curator: María Andreína Escalona De Abreu
pulp_work-afk.doc
An exhibition exploring weaving, sustainability, and labour by Chloë p.f. Lalonde and curated by María
Andreína Escalona De Abreu. From October 8th to 27th, 2024 the exhibition offers an accompanying public programming:
At its heart, the exhibition pulp_work-afk.doc is an invitation to reflect on the intricacies of weaving, papermaking and sustainability but also on the broader implications of labour within cultural production through dialogue and interaction. Visitors are encouraged to witness the artistic process firsthand, engaging in demos and discussions while the artists, curator and mediator are on site.
From Thursday to Sunday
🧶 1-6 pm: the exhibition is open and the artist Chloë p.f. Lalonde or mediator Hannah Ferguson are present and weaving.
Sunday October 13th
📄 1:30 to 5 pm: Papermaking Open Studio: join us at any point moment for demonstrations on how to transform yarn scraps into handmade paper and other diy and ecological techniques for art creation. Your dry paper creations can be picked up the following week and until the end of exhibition. We will be outdoors, so dress warm!
Thursday October 24th
💬 5 pm: curatorial walkthrough. Join curator María Andreína Escalona De Abreu and artist Chloë p.f. Lalonde for a guided visit of the exhibition and the process behind it. The conversation will fluctuate between English and French and everyone is welcome to join.
🎉 6-9 pm: Finissage. Light snacks and beverages will be served in celebration of the project and the people involved.
To see documentation of the exhibition, visit: https://mariaescalona.com/pulp_work-afk-doc
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Exhibition text:
What are the material traces of our labour? As artists, curators, art administrators, educators, writers, papermakers, weavers, and laborers we collaborate to inhabit Céline Bureau with work-in-progress, artworks, gestures, our time and more labour. As a continuation of the exhibition paper_work.doc presented at the FOFA Gallery this summer, which brought together artists working at the intersection of papermaking, sustainability, relational practices, and labour, we (re)think and expose our pulp, our work and our docs.
pulp
An undefined mass of material, in a wet, soft, shapeless state. See a pile of yarn scraps, shapeless blue fluff, a pile of seaweed used to give shape to a morphing soft sculpture, patches of handwoven fabric for future unidentified graphemes creating with, for and from our natural surroundings. We invite these materials to inhabit the garage as a way to embrace the creative process with all its mistakes, unexpected outcomes, and slow pace.
_work
An open invitation to continue developing a large artistic and research practice encompassing paperwork, artworks, craftwork, slow_work, and work_work. The pieces in the space result from discarded paperwork and string from past projects, from hiking in nature and weaving at the beach, from conversations in vernissages and experimenting in the garage, from a thesis in Vienna and many hours on the loom; they are new surfaces to continue to work; embodying the lived tension between making artwork and working in the arts. As cultural workers, we see the term holding space for all forms of labour related to creation and that sustaining such creation is to sustain good relations to ourselves, to each other, and to nature.
-afk.doc
A time and space dedicated for the weaver to work away-from-keyboard. A nod to a previous site-specific installation and performance, we weave canvases for soft sculptures and make paper out of scraps. The desk is now a swinging branch loom and the keyboard a shuttle of thread, the institution and fast-paced environment is now a garage — its corners, walls, ceiling, lamps, spiral staircase, and floors become a playground, a learning and teaching opportunity to materialize and make visible the labour behind art-making and exhibition-making.
Text by Chloë p.f. Lalonde and María Andreína Escalona De Abreu
Acknowledgements: thanks to the co-directors of Céline Bureau: Hugo Dufour and Elise Boudreau Graham, mediator and weaver: Hannah Ferguson, technician and sustainability coordinator: Josh Jensen, photographer: Alexandra Dumais, writer: Louise Campion, and our collaborators: CUCCR, Atelier Retailles and the FOFA Gallery for their support and care throughout and beyond this project.
