Ilga Leimanis
The Best Kept Secret in Montreal: Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal, Canada, October — December 2002
My curatorial essay:
The 10th Anniversary of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is an opportunity to celebrate the passage of time and acknowledge the gallery's history, and also to look forward to future periods of transformation and growth. The anniversary exhibition, The Best Kept Secret, aims to expand established boundaries and attempt something challenging and special, while marking the heights the gallery has be able to achieve over the course of the last decade.
The Best Kept Secret was organised with the idea of transforming the gallery space, challenging the existing environment as well as the viewer/participant, looking both forward and backward. Five artists were selected based on the different types of installation work they had produced in the past: Ingrid Bachmann, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Thérèse Chabot, Stéphane Gilot, and Vid Ingelvics each uniquely address the specific exhibition mandate and site of the gallery, while representing a different aspect of Canadian contemporary art, with geographical, cultural, generational, and linguistic differences. Their differing approaches give each area of the gallery its own distinctive atmosphere.
Site-specific art "articulates exchanges between the work of art and the places in which its meanings are defined."(1) These exchanges show a relationship between the art and its specific location - both as sense of place and as position occupied, with political, aesthetic, geographic, historic and metaphoric associations. If removed from the specific context of the site, the work, or the reading of the work, would not be the same. Negotiating the art/location relationship includes a process where each artist chooses to work with certain elements and references, adding and subtracting along the way. Similar changes and processes occur at an actual site, where daily routine adds experiences then erases them, in a continuous, performative, never-ending cycle. The university gallery is a public location, where multiple exhibitions are installed annually; between shows, the white walls are patched and cleaned, yet the past never completely disappears - rather, it lingers in the layers of memory.
The five artists included in this exhibition use the specific site of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery to investigate the intersections between place and its history. The theme of looking forward has also prompted examination, making transparent the inner workings of the gallery that normally remain obscure. This examination informally extends boundaries in the hope of encouraging new dialogues both inside the institution and beyond its physical space. Our culture has witnessed a proliferation of museums in the past century, each becoming a monument to its specific mandate. The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is a university museum "committed to researching, collecting and interpreting Canadian art."(2) Current museological discourse examines the structure and narrative of exhibited culture, and questions accepted systems of display, including the ideas, values and symbols employed in the exhibition and collecting practices of the institution. Thus "the museum [has] emerge[d] as a field of interplay between the social histories of collecting, classifying, entertaining, and legitimating."(3)
Although diverse in nature, the installations in The Best Kept Secret are unified by many common characteristics: a playfulness and fascination with dualities relates to a willingness to reveal the hidden (secret) mechanisms of (the) institution(s). The artists in Secret have presented new (or re-worked) projects, specific to the location, each with a sense of immediacy, spontaneity and excitement. Yet despite a desire for playfulness and fun, these works speak of contemporary concerns, mixing critique with appreciation, bespeaking the complex undercurrents that run through our society.
Vid Ingelevics began an investigation of history and memory, motivated by a search for identity lost through immigration.
His initial exploration led him to retrace the journey his family took after World War II, following their exile from Latvia.
Focused on documenting "some histories of everyday life" his approach was "Alltagsgeschichte a genre of historical investigation
of the unexceptional [and] the repetitive."(4) Ingelevics combined his practice as a photographer with his interest
in the production of memory through the construction of history, and its preservation and presentation in museums.
The birth of photography in the 19th century coincided with the development of public museums. Photography was used to record the world, perpetuating notions of truth and completeness still central to the activities of museums and archives today. Addressing photography's function as a tool of documentation within the museum, Ingelevics worked in the photo archives of major museums, reclaiming staff photographers' documents and reinterpreting them in light of contemporary discourse. He exposes the fragmentary and incomplete nature of collecting and preservation that run parallel to historical narrative, challenging the seamless production presented by the museum.
Invited to continue his investigation of institutional memory and the construction of identity, Ingelevics came to the Ellen Art Gallery for a week-long residency to research the contents of the administrative archive. Approaching the institution as both an exhibition and an administrative space, he was interested in exploring the subtleties and networks between the two, while grounding his work in the gallery's archive (an infrequently used storage space).
Accepting the challenge to transform and activate the front window (traditionally the location for the exhibition title and a tantalizing artwork), Ingelevics moves the entire gallery archive from the storage room to the front window. In his words, his "intention is to disrupt the chronological suggestion of a gallery history at the same time as suggesting historical absences, categorical limitations, and future possibilities," to reveal challenges to knowledge and the potential for the retrieval and loss of information.
During his research residency, Ingelevics discovered an archive folder marked "unidentifiable negatives". Printed by the artist and mounted on the wall, these negatives are now "identifiable" by the public, who are invited to provide captions for them, to restore a lost history, if only a fictive one. Ingelevics is interested in the possibility of multiple captions, multiple meanings, collected and complied on the wall during the course of the exhibition. Ingelevics' final intervention is to invite the public to sit at the guard's desk, to occupy the only employee position in the gallery. Ingelevics' installation proposal instructs that on the desk there will be "three Concordia University binders: the first binder will be filled with receipts and work orders for which a visual referent cannot be found. The second will be filled with receipts matched with photographs of their referent objects. The third binder will be filled with photographs of objects currently in the gallery and offices for which a receipt or work order could not be found."
Interested in "collective history written every day through local mythologies and regional speech," Thérèse Chabot comments on the lack
of space for the heartfelt and the sacred, reflections of our cultural memory. Her site-specific installations, or spiritual interventions,
feature the recurrent theme of the sacred garden, timeless and nomadic.
Using flowers grown in her garden as her primary material, Chabot approached The Best Kept Secret by blending her roots in meditative architectural spaces and sacred gardens with her royalty-inspired theatrical performances. Chabot explored the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery permanent collection in search of inspiration and, investigating the contents of the vault, found Alan Glass' (Queen Bee) Nouvelle rosée, nouveau miel, (1963).
Nouvelle rosée, nouveau miel is typical of Glass' production: shadow boxes filled with collected items. Queen Bee contains an image of Queen Elizabeth I, The Ditchley Portrait (c. 1592) by Marcus Gheeraerts, painted four years after the defeat of the Armada, when the Queen was fifty-nine years old. Shown standing on a map of Great Britain, Elizabeth is typified in this image as the Virgin Queen. Glass places the portrait in the upper part of the box, obscuring the map, instead positioning the Queen on top of a honeycomb, surrounded by bees and eggs.
Inspired by this work, Chabot merges her feminist interests with the mystical and natural, to examine the ritual productions of honey from the flower. The resulting installation, Une reine, 700 mâles, 26 646 ouvrières, allows her to comment on the fragility of power and the desire for empowerment. The delicate flower known as Queen Anne's Lace has been incorporated into a long piece of fine fabric and paired with a wax corset moulded from the artist's body, made into an abstracted, ethereal, queen's gown.
Chabot's reinterpretation of Glass' work offers a "utopian space suggesting a transformative inner space." Her ephemeral installation emphasizes the fleeting nature of power, fertility, and beauty. In this whimsical work, secrets are enveloped in smoke and flowers, creating a magical and almost surreal atmosphere – yet beneath the clichés and humour is a commentary on power and related behaviour.
Family and a connection to the natural environment have informed Mary Anne Barkhouse's work equally. Barkhouse has roots on both the west and
east coasts of Canada, belonging to native and non-native communities. Coming to terms with this dual heritage has been the focus of her
professional work.
The principal investigation throughout her diverse body of work is Barkhouse's attention to the socio-political and economic conditions traced through her family history, and the related history of colonization. Through the use of animal imagery in her jewellery and installation work, Barkhouse lends a voice to the 'other' – the marginalized and the dominated.
wake is a new site-specific installation created for the Secret exhibition. Featuring five cast beavers, each representing one century since colonial contact in North America, this work comments on the continued presence of the fur trade in Montreal and its impact on both beaver and Native populations. Celebrating resilience and the escape from eradication, Barkhouse defines the word 'wake' as an awakening from sleep or unconsciousness, a vigil or gathering to remember and celebrate the life of a person who has died, and the track or trail left by anything that has passed.
Using these multiple definitions, wake creates a quiet, reflective space, bringing elements from nature into the gallery. Attracted to the beaver's industriousness, Barkhouse writes that nothing is too big for the animals to attempt, "they approach their task methodically, with a set goal in mind." Similarly, Barkhouse addresses multiple layers of historical and contemporary connections between the beaver and native populations, including perpetrations against their economic and ecological systems; as an over-consumed economic resource of the new world, the beaver populations came to the brink of extinction. Its decline had direct implications for the environment and the delicate balance of our complex ecosystem.
(1) Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, (London: Routledge, 2000): 1.
(2) Ellen Art Gallery mandate.
(3) Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, "Introduction: Frameworks for Critical Analysis" in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994): ix.
Modris Eksteins, "Definition of Alltagsgeschtchte" in Alltagsgeschtchte (some Histories of Everyday Life/quelques histories de tous les jours), Toronto: Toronto Photographers Workshop and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (2000): 6.