Monday, November 25th 2024 at 6pm.
Join us for the double launch of two publication by Marilou Lemmens and Richard Ibghy, The Prophets and The Power Given to Abstractions That Make Us Stupid. Marie-Eve Beaupré, Director of the Foundation, will discuss the duo’s work, focusing on the central element of both publications: abstraction.
The Guido Molinari Foundation was privileged to welcome Richard and Marilou for a residency in winter 2022, culminating in the exhibition In the MIlk of Facts, There Always Lands a Fly. To build on the connections between our resident artists, we will take the opportunity to introduce the artists who will be in residence at the Foundation in winter 2025: Jean-Maxime Dufresne and Virginie Laganière. They will be revealing the subject of their research-creation residency in an exclusive discussion with Camille Bédard, Associate Curator of the Foundation.
Edited by Ana Bajaras, The Prophets: Richard Igbhy & Marilou Lemmens (YYZBOOKS, 2024) focuses on Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens’ seminal work The Prophets (2013-2015), a delicate handmade collection of 412 small, whimsical sculptures made from everyday materials that renders economic graphs into makeshift models. In this work, the artists explore what it means to move from a material world of entangled, interacting agents to a world of mathematical modelling and graphical abstraction. The Prophets cuts across a wide range of historical and contemporary topics of interest to economists such as labour, consumption, production, taxes, savings, investments, credit and so on, to constitute a diagrammatology of economic thought. The book includes texts by Peggy Gale (independent curator, author and editor), Sven Lütticken (critic and art historian), Harro Maas (economist and professor), Marina Roy (artist and author) and Jakub Zdebik (professor and art historian).
The Power Given to Abstractions that Makes Us Stupid (Agnes Etherington Art Centre & al., 2020) is the first monographic publication devoted to Ibghy & Lemmens’ practice. Edited by Sunny Kerr, it presents multifaceted works that often develop over several years and covers the duo’s artistic production from 2008 to 2018. The book includes essays by Vincent Bonin (author and independent curator), Lorna Brown (artist, writer and curator), Sunny Kerr (curator of contemporary art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre) and Melanie O’Brian (Associate Director/Curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery). It also includes an interview by Kitty Scott (Curator and Strategic Director at Fogo Island Arts) and a text written by the artists.
Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens create sculptures, videos, installations, public artworks, and artist books. Combining rigorous research with a material exploration that is specific to each project, their practice questions issues at the intersection of ecology, economy, epistemology, and history. For several years, they have examined the history of science and other forms of knowledge, including the language of economy, the magic of statistics, the capacity for models to impact the future, the aesthetics of data visualization, and the design of laboratory experiments. More recently, their work seeks to expand concepts of hospitality, care, and interspecies communication.
In addition to their individual practices, Jean-Maxime Dufresne and Virginie Laganière have been collaborating as a duo for some twenty years. Anthropological in nature, their artistic research focuses on the transformations of our built, natural, and technological territories, with a particular sensitivity to the human psyche. At the confluence of documentary, fictional and speculative approaches, their work with image and sound aims to interrogate various realities to reveal minor narratives. Their approach is primarily guided by field research, conceptual thinking and investigative processes deployed during residencies, which include collaboration with stakeholders from multiple horizons. Through the telescoping of diverse phenomena, their artistic production translates into protean installations that create a fertile dialogue in the arrangement of research material. In order to explore their experiential and critical scope, a reflection on the staging of the photographic and videographic image runs through all their exhibitions, integrating sound art, sculptural elements and architectural devices.
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