I got word today that the 2017 edition of Mémento was now available on the Est-Nord-Est website. Understandably, the past few years have been demanding for the organization, with the construction of a new building, staff turnover, and a global pandemic, but now their documentation is up to date, and on a new website too. You can download a pdf of the publication by clicking on the cover image below.
The publication covers the three residency periods that were held at Est-Nord-Est in 2017, and my essay describes the work of the artists in the Fall residency, for which I was the writer in residence.
On the Passage of a Few People…
On my way from Ottawa to Est-Nord-Est in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, I was thinking about “infrastructures of resonance.” The phrase had just been introduced to me by a professor at Carleton University when I was giving a tour of an exhibition that I had curated about the punk rock scene in Ottawa in the 1980s. He had been teaching the concept with reference to Nato Thompson’s Seeing Power (2015), and he told his class that the punk rock zines in the exhibition were perfect examples. Thompson describes infrastructures of resonance as projects that form a network of affiliations, and you can certainly see this in a zine as it gets circulated and shared by fellow punks. A zine, like any work of art, not only makes ideas public but also creates a public through its reception.
Approaching Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, along the river. Photo: Michael Davidge
Through their programming, publications, and other activities, artist-run centres such as Est-Nord-Est could also be considered infrastructures of resonance. Operating in communities both big and small across Canada, they actively promote and support the production and exhibition of contemporary art and the exchange of ideas that offer an alternative, and often critical, point of view on mainstream culture. I was looking forward to meeting and conversing with the other artists in residence: Jennifer Belair, Sophie Madeleine Jaillet, Christoph Mügge, and Céline Struger. In advance of the residency, I had another phrase in mind: “On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time.” Many years ago, a friend of mine lent me an exhibition catalogue with that title, taken from a film made by Situationist theorist Guy Debord, and it has continued to resonate with me. I was thinking of it partly because of the connections between Situationism and punk rock, but also because of the generic yet poignant applicability of the phrase. I wondered what encounters or exchanges had influenced or inspired the other artists at Est-Nord-Est. I would try to find out over the course of the next month.
Céline Struger, Studio installation view (detail), 2017. Photo: Jean-Sébastien Veilleux.
The body of work that Céline Struger developed during her two-month stint at Est-Nord-Est was the most directly inspired by the environment surrounding the artists’ residence and studios. Struger is an Austrian artist from Vienna who works in installation as a counterpoint to virtual reality. She uses both found and fabricated materials to create an alternate reality that questions concepts of value. The prominence of the St. Lawrence River in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli was manifested in the forms of the pieces that Struger created for an installation in her studio, which were derived either from a sketch that she drew of the shore of the river and its fascinating rock formations or from the objects that she found strewn along the shore, such as plastic six-pack rings. The installation incorporated these objects, including a sizable piece of charred wood and a rusted-out piece of machinery, suggesting an equivalency among the forms. A number of the pieces were ceramics fired in the Est-Nord-Est studio kilns. All of the ceramics were treated with an Obvara glaze, introduced to Struger by Judith Dubord, a local artist. Est-Nord-Est encourages and facilitates such interactions between local and visiting artists. Obvara firing, which creates a surface pattern that is said to ward off the evil eye, appealed to Struger because of her interest in the power of materials, both literal and symbolic. Through her treatment, quotidian objects are transformed into alien life forms that invite a re-evaluation of what can be known about them.
Because her practice is conceived as a kind of journaling, the work that Jennifer Belair produced at Est-Nord-Est also contained a strong connection to its location in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. Belair is an American artist currently living in Detroit, Michigan. With a printmaking background, she generally works on paper and makes drawings that incorporate observations of her surroundings with snatches of overheard conversations or thoughts that reflect her mental state at the time of their composition. For a while now, she has been working in a vein that mines the romantic tradition of the landscape genre, and the environs of the Bas-Saint-Laurent region lent themselves easily to this tendency in her work. Languages other than English appear in her drawings as a way to reach different audiences and as a visual element that expresses otherness. Reflecting the context in which she found herself, French appears in the drawings she made in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. A fan of country-and-western music, also because of its romanticism, Belair expanded her pantheon of musical heroes when she discovered French-Canadian country and western singer Willie Lamothe on the cover of a magazine in the local grocery store. She also ran a bookmaking workshop organized by Est-Nord-Est. By teaching a group of women at the Centre-Femmes La Jardilec to produce their own books that could be used as journals, she was a source of inspiration for Saint-Jean-Port-Joli as much as she drew inspiration from it.
Although her work is very much about the environment, Sophie Madeleine Jaillet did not draw specifically from Saint-Jean-Port-Joli for the subject matter of the work produced during her residency. A French-Canadian artist who lives and works in Montreal, Jaillet makes art as a method of performing the Anthropocene, the current geological period in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Her work often appears to be a kind of science experiment that renders abstract thought tangible. While at Est-Nord-Est, she made a series of “drawings” on Mylar by melting blocks of ice with graphite frozen within them, producing a visual analogue for the process of glaciation. Jaillet was also working on a piece that included a small set of quartz Platonic solids that represent an obsolete paradigm for understanding the universe. These solids are to be eroded in a rock tumbler. Although she works in a broader way with the environment, while in residence Jaillet took advantage of the specific resources that Est-Nord-Est makes available to artists and worked closely with technician Richard Noury to create fine wooden boxes and display cases for the Platonic solids. Through her work, and through the interactions that she has with people about it, she raises concerns about the intangibility of science and strikes a cautionary note. By asking questions that aren’t typically posed (by asking scientists “Are you hopeful for the future?” for example), she fulfils an important artistic role.
Christoph Mügge, Studio installation view (detail), 2017. Photo: Jean-Sébastien Veilleux.
Although the work that Christoph Mügge produced during his residency seems the furthest removed from the context of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, there is still an underlying connection with it. A German artist who lives and works in Malmö, Mügge created a series of woodcut prints that drew inspiration from the signs for bomb shelters, or skyddsrum, that are prevalent in Sweden. With a background in painting, Mügge has more recently turned to making large-scale installations with trash and recycled materials. In doing so, he comments on consumer society by revealing the excess of waste that is available for him to work with. At Est-Nord-Est, Mügge was able to use scraps from the wood shop to create his work. By the end of his residency, Mügge had finished a series of 36 editioned prints, each of them based on the design of the Swedish signs (featuring a blue triangle in an orange square) and incorporating cultural references related to bomb shelters. For example, in one of his prints the blue triangle resembles the shell of Bert the Turtle, the cartoon star of the “social guidance” film Duck and Cover produced in the United States during the height of the Cold War. With the heightening tensions among nuclear powers today, it is not surprising that Mügge would be focusing on this subject. However, it is also not that surprising that he produced a woodcarving of a turtle during his residency, given the rich history of woodcarving in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli.
As our residency drew to a close, the artistic director, Dominique Allard, asked all of the participants to give a list of five texts or references related to our research and production at Est-Nord-Est so that she can share them on the centre’s website. My list includes London Orbital (2002) by Iain Sinclair, which I managed to finish reading while I was there. From Sinclair’s book I gleaned an important distinction between the Greek philosophical concepts of chora and topos, which could be roughly translated as space and place, respectively. Est-Nord-Est is a kind of space that is oriented to being open to the acceptance of different ways of looking at things, and to different people who come from all over the world, if only for a brief moment in time. Although our list of references undoubtedly informed our production at Est-Nord-Est, I would say it was our encounter with the place where it is located and with the people who are there that had an even greater influence. As an infrastructure of resonance, the significance of the residency is further relayed through the projects that it supports and sends back out into the world.
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