Curatorial
“Collection Count + Care” with Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, General Idea, and Marcia Herscovitz
Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2022
Mentoship: Alicia Boutilier
count + Care
With Count + Care, we lovingly turn our attention to the collection. Over 17,000 works of art and culture are housed at Agnes. And in June, we begin to pack that collection in preparation for the building of Agnes Reimagined, our new future-oriented facility. As we pack, we take stock, and consider what it means to care for and be accountable to a public collection. Curated works in twos and threes hold space, or “take the stage,” for biweekly intervals, as we say goodbye to them temporarily. In the process, we bring stewardship forward to the gallery from back of house.
Count + Care seeks relationships within and conversations across the collection at Agnes and acts as a revolving access point through which to reflect on legacies of collecting, of holding but also homing. These works find themselves here through various means, whether a purchase, donation or transfer, tracing histories of artistic practice and curatorial priorities. Through inventory, Count + Care looks at what has been collected at Agnes and infers what should be collected in addition. The project not only revisits the well-known but also reveals the under-recognized in Agnes’s collection, those who may not yet have had an opportunity to speak through or about their collectivity. What stories do they tell? Come hear what the collection has to say.
Shortlisted for 2020 GOG Award: Innovation in a Collections Based Exhibition
Collections Count + Care
Alicia Boutilier (Lead Curator), Emelie Chhangur, Sebastian De Line, Sunny Kerr, Qanita Lilla, Elyse Longair, Carleigh Milburn, Kirsty Roberston, Suzanne van de Meerendonk, Curators
Alicia Boutilier, Vincent Perez, Emelie Chhangur, Sebastia De Line, Sunny Kerr, Qanita Lilla, Elyse Longair, Carleigh Milburn, Kirsty Roberston, Suzanne van de Meerendonk, Exhibition Designers
Leah Cox, Exhibition Coordinator
Mark Birksted, Ben Darrah, Scott Wallis, Installation Team
Barbara Astman, Eleanor Bond, Maud Darling, Erika DeFreitas, Sarindar Dhaliwal, General Idea, Edmund Yeamans Walcott Henderson, Marcia Herzcovitz, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Nobuo Kubota, David Milne, Allyson Mitchell, Monogrammist I. S., Norval Morrisseau / Miskwaabik Animikii, Kim Ondaatje, Isah Papialuk, Rembrandt van Rijn, Ted Rettig, Joyce Wieland, Artists Once Known, Artists
Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2022
Video by: Jay Middaugh
English transcript
French Transcript
“Collection Count + Care” with Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, General Idea, and Marcia Herscovitz
Collage is often an under-researched and under-recognized medium in a collection. It relies upon understanding of the images and materials being used, with the ability to see beyond the realities and meanings of the “original.” It also invites us to recognize relationships made possible through reimagining already existing images. General Idea, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, and Marcia Herscovitz all use simplified and powerful methods in their collages, combining two or three fragments to enact change and ignite imaginations.
Each collage, in their own particular way, focuses on energized thresholds filled with untapped potential, the spaces between, the push and pull that exist on, to borrow General Idea’s term, the borderline. General Idea’s borderline hovers between the public and the institution. Ibghy and Lemmens’s collages playfully considers internal and external ways of seeing. For surrealist Herscovitz—in her photocollage contribution to the 1968 artist portfolio S.M.S. (Shit Must Stop)—imagination forms a space between our conscious and subconscious. As we look forward to radical transformations with Agnes Reimagined, these works encourage us to critically and creativity re-examine the potentials that exists in Agnes’s fervent borderlines, holding both our pasts and futures .
Curated by Elyse Longair under the mentorship of Alicia Boutilier, as part of a practicum course in the graduate program of Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Queen’s University.