Sarah Greig and Thérèse Mastroiacovo: Rethinking and supposing. Trajectory of an exhibition

This important exhibition is dedicated to Sarah Greig and Thérèse Mastroiacovo whose practices are closely intertwined and whose approach is a form of open process from exchange to ideation, from production to public presentation, and beyond the moment of the exhibition. This project is a process for the artists and the curator, Michèle Thériault, to reflect on and inquire into the mechanisms of working together, circulating thoughts, relationality, and giving materiality to a common project.

Greig and Mastroiacovo have accompanied each other in art practice. They both work in a form of conceptual drawing, a kind of process drawing: drawing as doing, as recording, in the present and over time. With a focus on the processes and intentions of artworks, the doing of it more than the end result, this shared way is manifest differently in practice. A dynamic based on the circulation of idea and on distancing. On one side to tussle and spar with the apparatus of art, and on the other, to consider and propose ways of inhabiting it.

The curator imagines the experience of the visitor as a series of open statements that may enable the process of thinking again, for herself, a curator who has worked in the space of the gallery—the one Sarah and Thérèse are now inhabiting—over many years with a particular attention to context, the conditions of display, and the discourse of the exhibition. At this point in time, the layers of succeeding exhibitions, of works, of layout and display strategies is thick and dense. The references that emanate from the porous layers inflect her relationship with their work and their particular relationship to this space and its history.

Underlying the process of work and the shaping of what the visitor can experience is a stance fully embraced by artists and curator in relation to artmaking in our time, to what is the outcome of a practice, to what motivates its realization. It’s not so much about outrightly claiming, affirming, naming, and revealing, as it is a discreet form of queering of the system in place, arising through the reluctance, if not the refusal of the prevailing conditions and demands of the art world.