Two publications: Vincent Meessen. Blues Klair / Going To, Making Do, Passing Just the Same

Two new publications are now available in relation to important projects recently produced by the Ellen Gallery. 

Vincent Meessen. Blues Klair, edited by Vincent Meessen and Michèle Thériault, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in partnership with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, 2021. Illustrated, 312 pages. English and French.

Going To, Making Do, Passing Just the Same, edited by Edith Brunette and François Lemieux, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2021. Illustrated, 268 pages. English and French

Vincent Meessen. Blues Klair follows up and expands upon the exhibition Blues Klair featuring the important filmic installation Ultramarine by the Belgian artist Vincent Meessen. Curated by Michèle Thériault and produced by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (2018) at Concordia University it later traveled to The Power Plant in  Toronto (2019). A poetic, formal, rhythmic, and discursive immersion in the colour of history, this publication attempts to elucidate Western colonial modernity’s urges to conquer, classify, and immortalize. Texts by Corinne Diserens, Eric Fillion, Harmony Holiday, Kain The Poet, Vincent Meessen and Matthew Quest revisit elements of this exhibition that examines three journeys of exile at the end of the 1960s : that of Gylan Kain, the African-American poet precursor of rap at the end of the 1960s, of the Lettrist writer and critic Patrick Straram living in exile in Montreal in the late 1950s and of the Caribbean students involved in a racial uprising at Sir George Williams University (Montreal) in the late 1960s that resonated all the way to the Caribbean. Voices, sounds, and shapes calling for a blues of exile, a poetics and a politics dedicated to the harmonics of difference. Get your copy here.

Going to, Making Do, Passing Just the Same is part of the collaborative project of the same name by artists Edith Brunette and François Lemieux presented in the fall 2020 and into the winter 2021, which also includes an exhibition, a choreography and a round table on environmental racism and population displacements.

To counter the threat of the catastrophe depleting our political imaginary, we can take hold of it to reinvent how we live. But where—by what—does one begin grasping a deliquescent world? The editors and artists Edith Brunette and François Lemieux propose directing our attention to what’s below our feet and between our fingers, one step and one handful of earth at a time to ask the question: how do we inhabit a world made inhospitable? Authors Marisa Berry Méndez, Suzanne Beth, Erik Bordeleau, Dalie Giroux + Amélie-Anne Mailhot, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus and Diane Roberts, explore with them the notion of inhabiting those fragile territories by way of asbestos tailings, objects rescued from the trash, the administrative tangles of migrants entering “Canadian” territory, the shorelines of a broken memory, the future captured by financial entries, and the ruins of a hospital. Get your copy here.

Edith Brunette and François Lemieux’s exhibition continues at the Gallery until March 27.

Participate in the book launch and the roundtable discussion on March 22, from 2:30pm to 5pm, online. Visit our website for more information. Facebook Event