Summer Update from CUAG
Summer Artist and Curator Office Hours Residency
The inaugural Office Hours artist residency at the Carleton University Art Gallery was a fabulous success! The six weeks have flown by, and we’ve enjoyed sharing workspace with artists Rachel Kalpana James and Golrokh Salehi. Read on to learn more about what they worked on during the residency. Special thanks to Julie Hodgson, Founder of the Ottawa Art Society for generous support in enabling us to fund the Office Hours Curator contract position and hire FASS Sociology graduate Felicity Hauwert. We extend our sincere thanks to Felicity for their thoughtful stewardship of the program.
Felicity Hauwert (Office Hours Curator)
A mixed-race Black Nova Scotian and Dutch visual artist and curator living and working on unceded Algonquin territory, Felicity grounds her practice in creation-based research that explores memory, oral histories, diasporic constructions of home, and the enduring cultural and aesthetic connections across the Black Atlantic.
Rachel Kalpana James (Office Hours Artist)
Rachel used performance and collaboration to explore the intersections of craft, history, religion, and power. Working alongside veteran performance artist Hélène Lefebvre, she invited local artists into a series of conversations and collective experiments that examined lacemaking as both material practice and cultural metaphor.
Golrokh Salehi (Office Hours Artist)
Golrokh used the residency to undertake one of her most ambitious works to date. An Ottawa-based multidisciplinary artist, Salehi examines identity, memory, and the shifting relationship between an imagined “back home” and the realities of building a life in a new country. Working at a much larger scale than her previous pieces, she developed an evocative composition of interlocked figures connected through cascading black hair.
Preparing for autumn exhibitions
In August, we will host artist Joi T. Arcand who will transform the main floor of the gallery into an “immersive urban Cree utopia” for her exhibition ᑳᐃᓯᓈᑿᐦᑭ ᐃᑘᐏᓇ kā-isinākwahki itwēwina: The Shape of Words. Arcand reclaims nēhiyawēwin (the Plains Cree language), which she has been learning her whole life, and asserts its intellectual, aesthetic and cultural sovereignty and manifests its power to shape worlds.
Upstairs, we will present Faisa Omer: Threading Roots, an exhibition inspired by the lived experiences of Omer, a Somali Canadian photographer whose practice is shaped by her work in the mental health field and her personal journey as a racialized individual. Through photography, sound, and material elements, the exhibition explores how mental health is experienced, visualized and navigated within Somali Canadian communities. In addition to being a professional artist, Omer works as a mental health counsellor for racialized students living in residence at Carleton. The exhibition is curated by Reyhab Mohmed Patel, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Carleton.
The exhibitions open on Tuesday, Sept. 22 and run until Sunday, Dec. 13. The launch party will be held on Sunday, Oct. 4, featuring a conversational walk-through tour with the artists and curators at 1:30 pm. More details to come! To book a class visit, please reach out to Cara Tierney.
