Musée d’art de Joliette

Composed of Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley, who’ve worked together since 2004, Leisure explores such creative avenues as curatorship, publication, the organization of workshops and conferences, and the production of artworks. The duo’s first solo museum exhibition, How One Becomes What One Is, testifies both to the artists’ feminist sensibility and to their penchant for historical research and archives. The exhibition brings together a selection of projects that revisit the lives and works of seven female artists who left their mark in the first half of the twentieth century—some are well-known today, while others have been relegated to the footnotes.

Often taking parallel paths while relying on more peripheral disciplines or genres in art history (landscape, still-life, dance), these pioneering women based their approach on their particular experiences. Their artistic creations and their methodologies for collaborative work are equally stimulating for Carruthers and Wesley, who are also attentive to the challenging combination of desires, aspirations, personal and family life, a tension they transform into a creative force. “We study other lives so we might better live our own,” says historian Joseph Ellis, cited by Susan Harrington in a work dedicated to Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, one of their inspirations. That thought could well stand as Leisure’s motto, interested as they are in these women for the models they propose, often refusing to choosebetweenin order to embrace everything, including home life, with all the challenges that implies.

How does one become what one is? By emphasizing training, personal development, the construction of self by and through the construction of the work, Leisure brings attention to the creative process, which never occurs in a vacuum. These women whose lives and works are here examined, short of being partners as such, become Carruthers’ and Wesley’s counterparts, occupying particular positions in their intellectual and affective map, materialized of sorts in the exhibition, which takes its form from collage and assemblage. Leisure’s works speak to each other in the space, activating a network of references that have accumulated and crossed paths over time. They testify to a rich dialogue by which the duo sustains and regenerates itself, playing with ideas, images, and objects, found or constructed, that act as intuitive, indeterminate pointers to the histories and legacy of the feminist models that inspired them. Variously adapted to the present, these histories open onto broader reflections that suggest new ways of being in the world, of imagining one’s relationship to oneself, to others, and to one’s environment. It is up to each visitor to follow the thread of this great narration, across the temporal divide, and to enter the dance themselves.

Curator: Anne-Marie St-Jean-Aubre