A curatorial intervention at Galerie UQO (2023–2025): Unveiling

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.