Programming

Exhibition in 3 venues from June 7 to 26, 1988

galerie DARE-DARE - 4060 St-Laurent #211   ●   Espace 205 - 4060 St-Laurent #205   ●   La galerie du SAC - 2332 Édouard-Montpetit

Art et littérature féministes (Feminist Art and Literature) brings together women artists who are challenged by the language codes of the written and the pictorial. They are writers or artists, and sometimes both. Their different training and practices make this exhibition a place without frontiers, outside any specific current other than the one we have agreed to call "feminist". The proposed theme did not seek to represent a particular school or genre. Its aim was above all to offer, simultaneously with the 3rd International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal, a passage through a diversity of works exploring the interaction of two modes of expression.

The exhibition features three categories of artists. First, Jovette Marchessault and Mary Meigs, to whom we pay tribute for their creations as writers and visual artists. Next, the 17 Quebec and Canadian artists selected from over 60 candidates who submitted a work or project. Then there are the foreign artists who, through "Mail-Art", add an international dimension to the event.

Homage, interpretation, re appropriation, transvestism or the production of writing, their works reflect the pleasure and necessity of words, signifying the inescapable place they occupy in space and creation. Being concerned by words implies taking stock of their distinctive memory, playing up their virtue. Finally, the notion of feminism is linked here to a "thought/vision" that recognizes the socio-cultural contribution of women writers, enabling them to burst forth, identify and move forward. The very idea of choosing to exhibit and value the representation of women artists seems to us in itself a feminist approach. Women have to do with words, and as feminism developed with the spoken word, it seems that traces of it run through women's creative work.

with

Jovette Marchessault, Mary Meigs, Francine Beauvais, Ginette Bernier, Persimmon Blackbridge, Bianca Côté, Lucie Duval, Lucie Gagnon, Diane Giguère, Suzanne Grisé, Astrid Lagounaris, Renée Lavaillante, Andrée L'Espérance, Micheline Lévesque, Terri L. Roberton, Hélène Roy, Hélène Sarrazin, Cheryl Sourkes, Sylvie Thomas

presented by le centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire DARE-DARE with support from ministère des affaires culturelles du Québec