Between March 2023 and May 2025, Galerie UQO lent itself to a daring experiment: it invited Patrice Loubier to make the gallery the object and context for a “curatorial intervention.” Rather than propose an exhibition for presentation by the gallery, the idea was to develop a project that would invest the gallery from within, transforming its components and the daily work of its administrative team into creative opportunities for guest artists. Over the past two years, the gallery’s technical equipment, work meetings, communications, and team routines have become the subject matter for works created by the curator and four invited artists: Guillaume Clermont, Chloé Desjardins, Laurent Marissal, and Anouk Verviers. Developed on the premises and within the very operations of Galerie UQO, their interventions have mostly escaped the public’s view. The present exhibition revisits these works in an effort to look “under the hood” of this long-term exploratory project.
With Sans titre (Une procédure infructueuse) (Untitled – Unfruitful Procedure), Guillaume Clermont transforms the gallery director’s work literally into “a work.” The director’s responsibilities bring her into contact with many different people (artists, curators, technicians, etc.) for purposes of preparing the gallery’s programmed exhibitions. But one particular email correspondence with the director of the École supérieure d’arts et médias de Caen-Cherbourg, to borrow a painting by Clermont (sent to the school a few years earlier along with his application for a teaching post), proves to be something out of the ordinary. Beyond merely obtaining a piece for an exhibition, the director’s correspondence also becomes the spark that touches off the artist’s project, as the story of this absent painting plays out between the lines of these e-mails and the institutional blind spots they expose, thus forming an integral part of Clermont’s project.
With an artistic practice that extends as much to life itself as to various media such as books, magazines, and conversations, painter Laurent Marissal draws inspiration from Galerie UQO’s work habits and environments (staff breaks taken outdoors, the green hue of a nearby lake curiously bearing the name “Pink”) to create scripts for “pictorial actions” intended for the gallery team. An opportunity for introducing a little play into the workplace, with its scrupulously ordered functions and habits, the project recalls the inaugural gesture of Marissal’s practice—to recover the ability to create even while carrying out the museum security guard job that deprived him of it—a seven-year-long stratagem that the artist recounts in Pinxit 1, his first book work.
For several years, Chloé Desjardins has taken an interest in the material devices that frame, support, and protect works of art. For her Fantômes project, the artist created replicas of tools and office items of the sort commonly used in art institutions, which she infiltrates into the gallery’s workspaces to be discovered by staff members as they go about their tasks. These phantoms of gallery objects sometimes went unnoticed for quite a long time by staff whose eyes have become attuned to their assiduous labour and attention to the visual arts … until they find themselves thwarted as they seek, in vain, to put one of these objects to use! The playfulness of Fantômes is thus twofold in its critical significance, revealing the “blind” reflexivity of the familiar gesture, the slackening of attentiveness due to routine, which may lead us to take a sculptural replica for the actual article.
The project Si deux consonnes forment un angle aigu, il suffit de l’arrondir légèrement (If two consonants form an acute angle, you need only round it off a little), by Anouk Verviers, examines a key cog in the wheel of any organization: the meeting, which brings together its team members to consult with one another on the work and goals that unite them. For two years, Verviers attended team meetings of UQO’s Vice-Rectorate on Research, Creation, and International Partnerships, meetings in which the gallery’s director also took part. Using a stenographical code of her own devising, the artist transcribed the meetings—not what was spoken, but the vocal tones, gestures, exclamations, and non-verbal expressions accompanying the discourse. Her notes, in turn, led Verviers to begin creating “conversation drawings,” which offer glimpses into the dynamics of these encounters. In this way, Anouk Verviers’s project ventures beyond Galerie UQO itself, examining the wider context that encompasses it and lends it its identity: a gallery dedicated, like the university that hosts it, to research and creation.
Header image of the article: Patrice Loubier, 2024. (translater : Edwin Janzen).
Presentation Reference:
Jessica Ragazzini, “Unveiling Through Words: A Day of Study on Patrice Loubier’s Curatorial Intervention at Galerie UQO “, presentation at the Day of Study, organized by Galerie UQO and Patrice Loubier, Gatineau, May 8, 2025.
Sum up
Why has Galerie UQO invited a curator to infiltrate its structures and operations? And if the aim here is to make the gallery’s operations the subject and context for original artistic creations, then how can we reconcile the demands on the team, who must carry out their tasks often under tight deadlines, with the exploratory mode of artistic experimentation and the inherent risks that such an intervention involves? How shall we speak about a project that has taken nearly two years to complete, within an art institution, yet with little or nothing for the public to see? Does a creative context such as this one transform the relationship between artist, curator, and institution, and, if so, how? What were the expected spin-offs from this initiative—for the gallery, the curator, and the artists, but also in terms of research and creation in contemporary art? And, last but not least, what is a “curatorial intervention”?
This study day has been organized to discuss precisely these questions and showcase aspects of the project that complement the exhibition—that is, through the testimonies, reflections, exchanges, and accounts of events of the people who conceived, realized, and lived it across its two-year duration. These include the artists, the curator, and the members of the Galerie UQO team, who were at once the “object” of the intervention, the participants in this experience, and its initial public.
The study day will be structured in three parts, corresponding to the curatorial intervention’s stages of development: before (conception), during (execution), and after (reflection and analysis following the event, as well as initial critical responses).
In an opening exchange, gallery director Marie-Hélène Leblanc and curator Patrice Loubier will retrace the genesis of the project, presenting the ideas behind the intervention and how the curator chose to apply them to the Galerie UQO setting.
The two roundtable discussions that follow, one before and one following the lunch break, are devoted to how the project unfolded in practical terms. Each roundtable brings together two of the participating artists and a member of the gallery team. After outlining his reasons for inviting the artists, the curator will then open each exchange, posing a few questions to the participants: How were the artists able to negotiate the rules of the intervention game? What aspects of the gallery did their respective projects address, and why? How did their projects align with, or renew, their artistic practices? And how were these interventions received by the gallery? How did members of the gallery’s team cope with interventions that sometimes demanded their active collaboration, or, in other cases, were designed to surprise them?
To conclude the study day, an invited outside observer, inspired by an initial visit to the exhibition and the remarks of the participants earlier in the day, will share thoughts, intuitions, and questions. Eduardo Ralickas, Professor of Art History at UQAM, will seek to ignite a process of critical reflection by examining the curatorial intervention not only as an outside observer, but also looking back on the project following its culmination. Interrogating the project’s significance, Dr. Ralickas will reflect on how it may be understood and situated within the field of contemporary art—an undertaking that clearly invites reply.