Her Story: Professional Women in Montreal’s Art Scene
Feb 9 2018 EV 1.615
CUJAH
The Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History (CUJAH) is a studentrun association that aims to showcase the talents of Concordia University’s undergraduate Art History and Fine Arts students by means of an annual journal publication and conference event. CUJAH strives to provide students with academic and professional opportunities through workshops, events, and online resources. CUJAH is composed of an executive team, an editorial team, a design team and is assisted by faculty members in the Department of Art History.
Yiara
Yiara Magazine is an undergraduate feminist art and art history publication. We publish an annual print magazine and organize an exhibition of the featured artworks. Our goal is to provide a platform for students to think about women in art—a subject that we believe still requires considerable exploration— through a diversity of visual and written material. Yiara emphasizes the collaboration of students from various disciplines across Montreal in the interest of forwarding and cultivating an inclusive space for feminist dialogue. Yiara also hosts several academic and cultural events which allows the undergraduate community to share their ideas and engage with people from other programs and backgrounds, as well as established Montreal artists and art institutions.
HerCampus
Her Campus is the #1 new-media brand for the empowered college woman. Written entirely by the world’s top college journalists—with 11,000+ contributors and counting—HerCampus. com features national Style, Beauty, Health, Love, Life, Career, Entertainment, News, DIY, LGBTQ+, High School, and After College content supplemented by local content from 350+ campus chapters nationwide and in 11 countries. In addition, Her Campus offers an email newsletter, The InfluenceHer Collective, Her Conference®, College Fashion Week®, High School Ambassador Program, Her Campus Shop, The Her Campus Guide to College Life, and even more products, programming, tools, and events to fulfill its mission of serving college women across every platform.
Acknowledgement
The Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History (CUJAH) would like to express our appreciation to everyone who made this event possible. In particular, we would like to extend our thanks to all the speakers who graciously took the time out of our their busy schedule to come speak about their experiences in Montreal’s art scene. We would also like to thank our collaborators, Yiara Magazine and HerCampus Concordia, for their contribution and continued support in putting on this event. We would also like to thank Concordia University’s Department of Art History and Dr. Anna Waclawek for all their help.
Lastly, CUJAH would like to acknowledge that Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters we now call Montreal. Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. We respect the continued connections with the past, present, and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.
The Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History (CUJAH), Yiara Magazine and HerCampus Concordia are proud to present our event, Her Story: Professional Women in Montreal’s Art Scene. Many students have trouble imagining how to connect what they learn and experience in university to the idea of a future profession, especially in the fine arts. Her Story aims to provide a platform showcasing to students in the arts what kind of careers are available in the local art milieu, and to empower women to dream big and be ambitious in the pursuit of their desired profession. By inviting successful professionals in Montreal’s art scene, namely a number of curators, researchers and innovators (many of whom are Concordia alumnis) to retell their stories and experiences, students can witness first-hand how they got to where they are today and hopefully leave feeling motivated, informed, and inspired!
Intro duction
Speaker Schedule
3:00 3:15 –3:30
Introduction by CUJAH
Speaker 1 Eunice Bélidor Programming Coordinator at Articule
3:35 –3:50
Speaker 2 Avery Zhao Founder of Art Crush
3:55 –4:10
Speaker 3 Brittne Potter Co-Founder of Centerfold 15 Minute Break / Mingle
4:25 –4:40
Speaker 4 Melanie Binette Artistic Director of Theatre Nulle Part
4:25 –4:40
Speaker 5 Joanna Berzowska Associate Dean Research of the Faculty of Fine Arts
5:05 –5:20
Speaker 6 Erandy Vergara Artistic Director from Eastern Bloc
–6:00
15 minute question period Mingle
Eunice Bélidor
Born in Montreal, Eunice Bélidor is a curator, critic and researcher, specializing in contemporary Haitian art and interested in fashion design, performance, post-black studies and feminism. She questions everything, believing that asking the right questions is the best ways to come up with creative and thoughtful answers. She holds a B.A in art history from Concordia University (Montreal), a M.A in art history and visual culture, and a graduate diploma in curatorial studies from York University (Toronto). She has organized and curated various exhibitions, and her writing has been published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies, Invitation (Art Mûr gallery), InCirculation, and Espace Art Actuel.
Bélidor is also the creator of #CuratorialTips, a research and help tool for curators. She regularly takes part in various juries and committees, and currently sits on the Visual Arts Evaluation Committee at the Conseil des Arts de Montréal. She also works as programming coordinator at articule, an artist-run centre in Montreal.
Avery Zhao Avery Zhao is a visual artist whose practice focuses on painting, sculpture and installation. Topics of research include urban and futurist identities and living, multidisciplinary interpretations of a narrative, and the documentary painting of contemporary work situations. She is inspired by the patterns, constraints, notation and arrangement systems of the music and dance disciplines. She explores these in her own practice of live painting, which she prefers to call 'reactionary painting'. Zhao was born in Beijing, China, and at the age of five her family moved to Ottawa, Ontario. She has studied Design at Ryerson University and from 2005 to 2008 she studied at the Grande Ecole ESMOD in Paris, France, where she graduated in Fashion Design. For several years following she worked as a fashion designer in Paris and Montreal for international brands, her work leading her to research trips around Europe, Asia and the US.
After leaving this position to pursue a second degree in Fine Arts, she currently works at the Institute for Urban Futures at Concordia University. Zhao was a coordinator for FASA from 2015–2017 and is a board member for RAAV, the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec.
In 2013, Zhao founded the on-going multidisciplinary project Art Crush. In 2016, she completed a two-week residency entitled ‘Tactile Museum’ at the Montreal artist centre Eastern Bloc, in collaboration with a dance choreographer. In 2017, Art Crush performed at the Salle Bourgie of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with innovative Baroque group Ensemble Caprice.
During a month-long residency at the Banff Centre of the same year Zhao continued her research on the Art Crush project, creating dozens of live-painted artworks and a set of specialized painting tools. This work, entitled 'The Painter as Scribe', was exhibited at the VAV Gallery in Fall 2017. Zhao is currently working on a 25 minute live-painting video commission by pianist David Jalbert, to visualize his recording of Phrygian Gates by composer John Adams.
Brittne Potter graduated from Concordia's Studio Arts Program before working in Montreal's creative scene. After multiple internships, she cofounded Centerfold; an organization whose goal is to promote art and creativity by funding artists. Centerfold facilitates artists’ endeavours by putting money in their pockets. The idea flourished into a series of pop-up exhibitions that showcases the work of local artists and crowd-sourced funds for those featured. The revenue from the exhibition is distributed back to the artists. In the past year, Centerfold has expanded its operations by developing an online art marketplace. A key feature of which is a 3D gallery which allows users to browse the works in a virtual environment. By replicating aspects of a physical space within the digital world, they’re aiming to make the space more accessible to everyone.
Most recently, Centerfold will be opening a brick-and-mortar location in Westmount’s, “Victoria Park” building on February 9th. This space will serve as a space to exhibit emerging local and regional artists, furthering their ethos of promoting and contributing to Montreal's thriving and exciting artistic scene.
Brittne Potter
Melanie Binette Melanie Binette is a performance artist and scholar. She holds a bachelor’s degree in drama from UQAM, as well as a master’s of fine arts from Concordia University in an individualized program combining performance, art history architecture and communication.
Binette is the co-founder and general and artistic director of the Théâtre Nulle Part (TNP), an artist collective whose objective is to question the relationship between audience and space, be it architectural, urban, public or political. Some of TNP’s performances have taken place in empty commercial lots (Lèchevitrine, 2011), cul-de-sacs (Fenêtres murées/Daylight Robbery, 2010) and even women’s bathrooms (Bonheur biochimique, 2010).
She has given talks at Cégep Édouard Montpetit and Concordia University, and has spoken at the Renew: Digital Arts Festival and Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Most recently, Binette has been published in Canadian Food Studies concerning her piece Invisible Guests (2015), a sound installation created in collaboration with the community restaurant Chic Resto pop. Her work has also been published by Aparté | Arts Vivants, Renew: Digital Arts Forum, and Troubler la fête, rallumer notre joie, a publication from Journée sans culture.
Joanna Berzowska
Joanna Berzowska is Associate Dean Research of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. She is also a member of the “Textiles and materiality� Research Cluster at the Milieux Institute and the founder of XS Labs, a design research studio focusing on textilesbased wearables as well as the enabling methods, materials, and technologies that drive innovation in composite functional fibers, textile electronics, and additive manufacturing. For the last five years, she has been the Head of Electronic Textiles at OMsignal, a Montreal-based wearable and smart textile company that launched the Ralph Lauren PoloTech shirt. Her work has been shown at the V&A in London, Cooper-Hewitt in NYC, Millennium Museum in Beijing, Australian Museum in Sydney, NTT ICC in Tokyo, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, SIGCHI, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz among others. She lectures internationally about the field of electronic textiles and related technological, social, aesthetic, and political issues.
Erandy Vergara curates, investigates, reads and writes about contemporary and media art. Her main research interests include feminism, global art histories, curatorial studies, postcolonialism, and critical race studies, with a particular interest in recent remix cultures, the strengths and downfalls of science and technology, decolonial uses of media, critical histories of virtual reality, and the aesthetics and ethics of participation. She earned a MA at Concordia University and a PhD in Art History at McGill University. She has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec–Société et culture. Her dissertation focuses on movement and orientations in interactive installations from Latin America.
She has curated and produced a number of exhibitions in diverse institutions ranging from media art museums (Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico) to alternative spaces (Manchester Digital Laboratory, U.K.). She is the artistic director of Eastern Bloc and was Programming Coordinator of Studio XX from September 2015-2017. Her writing has been published in books and journals including: “The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies” (2014) and “[Ready] Media: Towards an archeology of Media and Invention in Mexico” (2013).
Erandy Vergara
Notes