Chapter 2: About the Exhibition

Speaker 0 00:00:00 Chapter two about the exhibition. This chapter introduces the exhibition and it's three minutes long. It was written by Q Ag curators, Heather Anderson, Sandra Dick, and Danielle. Print up Q Ag turn 30 in the fall of 2022, we're celebrating our birthday, withdrawing on our history. Drawing on our history is an experiment. We organized it using a polyvocal curatorial model that embodies and furthers our long history of collaborative exhibition making Each person on the curatorial team, five guest curators with whom QA has worked in the past. And three QX staff members invited a Canadian artist with a timely and compelling drawing practice. The drawings and drawing based works made by these eight artists. Open conversations with drawings selected from Carleton University's art collection. Drawing on our history illuminates over 70 years of art collecting activity at Carleton. It presents the first drawing acquired by the university, which commissioned Elizabeth Harrison to render its crest and motto in 1951. Speaker 0 00:01:13 It pays tribute to Jack and Francis Barwick, whose transformative 1984 bequest led to the founding of Q Ag in 1992. It reflects on an exponential period of collection growth under the Gallery's first Director Michael Bell. Today it includes 13,720 drawings, many of which were generously donated by artists and collectors. Drawing on our history also features our most recent acquisition, the Remarkable 2022 Gift of Ed. P'S Medusa. A monumental shimmering composition drawn with a sharp knife. P'S arresting work points to some of the ways that artists use drawing today to anchor personal and cultural identities, to investigate ideas, techniques, genres, and traditions to recuperate, erased histories, to tell stories, to mitigate loss, to declare positions. Drawing on our history is installed by Patrick Lakas and Andrew Johnson, amplified by public programs. Created by Fiona Wright and tours by Jessica Andre, and supported by administrator Vicki McGlinchy and research assistant Mackenzie Holbrook, taken together the work of the invited and collection based artists. The guest curators and the Qag team constitutes a multifaceted look at drawing past and present at the development of the University's collection and at our evolution as an organization over three decades. Thank you for your vital trust, generosity, participation, engagement, and support. Qag would not be here without you. You are an essential part of the gallery's history as well as its present and future.