Things: materials, tools, knickknacks, artifacts, trash, scrap. Tangible things—to consume and discard, to cherish and preserve. Things that capture your attention, things that define you, inanimate things, new things, and big things. So many things. Too many things. 

What do we make of all these things? What knowledge emerges from exploratory material research-creation? 

Join us for Objets trouvés: Material Gatherings, an exhibition of ten student projects and panel discussions with the artist-researchers that will focus on new narratives addressing our interrelationships with material objects. This is part of the course Critical Materiality (DCART 498-631) taught by prof. Alice Jarry. Bringing together storytelling, print and digital arts, and sensory attunements, this event aims to open up dialogues and new imaginaries around what it means to make, think, and live with things. 

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube. 

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca  

Wandering with Matter (Jean Philippe Côté)

Wandering with Matter is an inquiry into the artistic potential of “obsolete” objects and how they can become source material in the creation of interactive art. 

Instruments for our Last Supper (Raphaël Viens)

Instruments for our Last Supper examines how the future domestic landscape influences new means of consuming food through its tools and instruments, outside of the dining room. 

The Life of a Diasporic Object (Tarcisio Cataldi Tegani)

The Life of a Diasporic Object is a visual participatory exploration of identity and belonging through cultural objects of the Brazilian community in Montréal. 

Starting at a Garage Sale, The Afterlives of Things: Stories of Secondhand Objects (Rachel Kirstein)

The Afterlives of Things is a print collection of the stories, intimacies, and resonance of secondhand objects that (re)animate consumption cycles. 

Made with Mother (Brianna Kormendy-Ramirez)

Made with Mother is an exploration into how biofabricated SCOBY leather serves as a bridge between tradition and innovation and gives new meaning to long-standing craftsmanship methods. 

To Have and to Hold (Claire Natalie Lecker)

To Have and to Hold aims at disrupting material hierarchies that associate low-value plastics with single-use functions. What happens when these plastics adopt the visual characteristics of cherished objects? 

Mixed Waste Paper: From Disposability to Sustainability (Marian Grippa Almeida)

Mixed Waste Paper explores alternative waste disposal practices and experiments with the embedded stories of found materials and liminal spaces through paper production. 

Back to the Pulp: Reusing Recycled Papers (Fateme Roozi)

Back to the Pulp examines the interconnected issues of deforestation and recycling through the exploration of cellulose-based recycled pulp to produce material for creating structural and loadable furniture. 

What can’t be seen does not exist (Elisabeth Bureau)

This project offers an opportunity to reflect on our relation to space and matter through our acquired sensorial knowledge and body memory.

Stagnation (Teague Riordon)

Stagnation proposes the creation of digital animated environments  as a form of preservation and recontextualization of unattended, transitory urban spaces and their objects through photogrammetry.