Events and Projects

je n'étais pas qu'une simple chimère

(Added 7 September 2009)

Image: Lili Reynaud-Dewar, The Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality of the European Shorthand Typists 2 (detail) 2009, Still from video projection

je n’étais pas qu’une simple chimère
I haven’t been a figment of my own imagination

Aleesa Cohene (Cologne), Luanne Martineau (Victoria), Lili Reynaud Dewar (Paris), Lucie Stahl (Vienna)

21 November, 2009 – 23 January, 2010
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
372, Ste-Catherine West, space 507
Montréal, QC

Inspired by a photograph taken in 1974 of a group of women in conversation while lounging in a Paris studio, this exhibition presents the work of four contemporary artists (Aleesa Cohene, Luanne Martineau, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Lucie Stahl) whose practice, directly or indirectly engages with the formal visual elements and-or conceptual legacy of an earlier generation of feminist artists from the 70s and early 80s.

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Watching Water: Views of Niagara Falls

(Added 1 November 2009)

In the heat of SUMMER!, a detail from Watching Water: Views of Niagara Falls, Leisure Projects’ contribution to AbC’s WATER anthology. With special thanks to photographs posted to flickr by: Wil Zoetekouw (summer of 2003), Yangyongwei (August 2, 2005), hokorii, August 2, 2007, Difo&Natura (August 6, 2008), Wolfgang Staudt (August 10, 2006), digitaleye81 (August 19, 2007), Dreamer (August 24, 2006)

Alphabet City is a series of annual hardcover anthologies originating from Toronto, Canada. Each volume in the series addresses a one-word topic of global concern and draws on the diverse perspectives of writers and artists from many cultures and disciplines. Each book is a graphically rich and textually surprising combination of images and texts that critically and imaginatively reinvents the topic at hand…

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Making It Work

(Added 10 April 2009)

May 5 to June 13 2009
MAKING IT WORK
BGL, CRUM, DGC~CGA, Knowles Eddy Knowles, Leisure Projects, PME-Art
Curator: Susannah Wesley

Organized by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Université Concordia University
1400, boul. de Maisonneuve ouest, Montréal
(514) 848-2424, ext. 4778

Opening: Saturday May 2 4–6 pm

The exhibition Making It Work explores the process of collective art practice. How do collectives work? How are collective imaginaries formed and developed? How does the process vary from one collective to another? How does shared authorship affect what is achieved as the end result? Collaboration is the site where art making is actively complicated, where discussion, cooperation and argument coalesce to shape something new. The process is fascinating, rich and essential to the collective being.

photo: Leisure Projects, Folie à deux, video still, 55 mins, 2009

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Hair Follies ~ La Perruque

(Added 5 January 2009)


Bernard Perreault, Galaxie, 1968, Collection Musée d’art de Joliette

Hair Follies ~ La Perruque
Matthieu Gauvin
Maya Hayuk
Fabienne Lasserre
Io Palmer
Ken Smith

January 5th – February 6th
FOFA Gallery
1515 St. Catherine St. West, EV 1.715
Montreal, Québec
www.fofagallery.concordia.ca

January 15th
Opening, 6-8pm
and wig-making workshop with artist and fashion designer Rainer Clair Gilles

Leisure Projects is pleased to present Hair Follies as the first exhibition of 2009 at the Concordia University FOFA 1 gallery. Sometimes beautiful and ornamental, other times abject and grotesque, hair is an unassuming yet powerful personal agent. In the spirit of “perruque” 2 the Hair Follies exhibition claims the head as a site for the creative analysis of personal décor…(more after the jump).

Leisure Projects and the FOFA gallery would like to extend their special thanks to the Musée d’art de Joliette and Art Solution Services inc. for their help in the realisation of this project.

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Leisure Letters welcomes guest editor Catherine Sinclair

(Added 1 December 2008)


Festive Drop In Invitiation, laser print, foil stamp and gold sparkles, 2005

Leisure Projects always thrills to the festive season. In past years with holiday teas, festive drop-ins and greetings we have indulged in all the fancy dressing and trimming that seasonal customs provide. To help us celebrate this year, we are pleased to invite the first ever guest editor to the Leisure Letters section of our website.

For the next weeks Catherine Sinclair, Curator of the Firestone Collection of Canadian Art and Assistant Curator of the Ottawa Art Gallery, will be writing a series of Leisure Letters on the history of Christmas greeting cards. Drawing on her graduate research on Christmas cards in Canada, Catherine will focus on artists’ Christmas card designs, specifically on the “Canadian Artists’ Series”; a series of artists’ cards designed to promote Canadian landscape art, printed by the Toronto firm Rous and Mann, Ltd., in the 1920s until the 1950s.

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Leisure Office Hours

(Added 16 August 2008)

Lou Grant’s desk from the set of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1970 to 1977 (Collection of the Kansas State Historical Society)

Leisure Office Hours
With the collaboration of Zoë Chan and Mark Clintberg
Knock on Woods International Residency and Dwelling for Intervals

Friday September 5th, 15-18h
262 Fairmount ouest
Montreal, QC

Office hours involve being present for work in a fixed location for a set and known duration. These set hours encourage communication and work flow between internal members of an organisation and external participants in projects or services. With the Leisure Office Hours experiment we ask ourselves if there might be something we are missing by eschewing a work routine. Could the formalized act of being present change the way our ideas are generated and elaborated? What kind of unexpected communications might occur during Leisure Office Hours?

Yvette Poorter’s, Knock on Woods International Residency and Dwelling for Intervals is a constructed space that dedicates itself to offering local and international artists a sense of rootedness and respite from a hectic and bewildering globalism. The residency is a para-site that consists of a rustic tent-cabin and a forest of tree-flags that can be and has been situated almost anywhere. www.thisneckofthewoods.net

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