Artist-in-Residence

Through a blend of archival sources and fiction, the exhibition To All the Unnamed Women chronicles the origins of the first organization in Quebec to be created by Black women, the CWCM. Drawing inspiration from the notion of critical fabulation theorized by the American author Saidiya Hartman, the exhibition explores the relationship between history and archival violence.

The exhibition Swallowing Mountains explores the relative silence in public records and historical accounts of women in Montreal’s Chinatown in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the discrepancy between the historical attraction to chinoiseries and Japanism and the reality of Chinese women living in Canada since the late 19th century.

In the exhibition Piqutiapiit, Niap presents a piece that pays tribute to the work of Inuit women of the past. She acknowledges and celebrates Inuit women’s expertise and artistic talent by revealing the finesse and refinement of the traditional objects that she found in the Museum’s collections and how they reflect and relate to women’s lives.

The exhibition There Once Was a Song examines the relation between humans and nature through three original works inspired by late 19th century glass bell jars from the Museum’s Material Culture collection. Symbols of another era, these jars containing mounted animals and dried plants were the starting point for the artist’s creative process. For the first time, Meryl McMaster has created an exhibition where she combines photography, her preferred art form, with other media like video and sculpture. Her work questions the desire to capture and confine the natural world in order to freeze it in time.

The works in the exhibition there’s a reason for our connection began with an idea that became something else as a result of time spent opening the drawers of the Museum’s archive to examine many and varied hand-stitched, woven and worn objects, and deciphering hand-written histories: notes, letters and ledgers. The works were developed through thinking about the connections between objects and their makers, objects and their collectors, and how the objects transition between the archive and the living world. The resulting artworks explore different ways of recording experience through sensory engagement to highlight relationships past, present and future.

Marisa Portolese has been making portraits of women from a feminist perspective. The exhibition In the Studio with Notman is composed of large-format colour photographs taken in natural light with an analog camera, and explores the studio tradition and its decors, paying particular attention to the backdrops and accessories used by Notman in photographing female subjects.

Nadia Myre draws inspiration from Victorian (1837-1901) women’s periodicals and publications to create her work featured in the exhitbion Decolonial Gestures or Doing it Wrong? Refaire le chemin. From these texts, instructions for the creation of four Indigenous inspired objects are read aloud to the artist, with the omission of any hints as to the nature of the objects. She thus follows the instructions without any knowledge beforehand of what they describe. The resulting works are exhibited next to cultural assets drawn from the Museum’s Indigenous Cultures collection, illustrating a decolonial gesture as a process for the recovery of a Native identity.

In the exhibition The end of the beginning, Frédéric Lavoie presents a video work inspired by the Museum’s collections. The installation looks at the strange nature of our relationships with objects from the past through a fictional account of the end of the world – an apocalyptic rereading of the history of North America and Montreal.

Kent Monkman presents Welcome to the Studio, a work comprised of more than 30 portraits by Notman in the Museum’s collection. This original installation, which focuses on the relationship between photography and painting, plunges you into the world of photographer William Notman as well as that of painter Gustave Courbet, leader of the realist movement.

In her work, Families, Marie-Claude Bouthillier expresses the formal and material relationships between painting, textiles and games. She has drawn her inspiration from familiar objects. Quilts, arrowhead sashes, bedspreads and board games found in both the Museum’s collections sparked ideas that the artist associated with her family. The historical objects she chose led to the creation of a unique work of art that builds on the notion of ancestry. By juxtaposing historical objects with contemporary artwork inspired by motifs from the past, Marie-Claude Bouthillier questions and exposes the unstable relationships between craftsmanship and art and between the human body and memory.