Everyday Cooking, Cooking Every Day is an investigation into the parallels between curatorial, artistic, and gastronomic practice, bringing together colleagues and friends Zoë Chan and Mark Clintberg. This two-week residency will combine discussion, poster making, blogging, grocery shopping, and meal-making, where Chan and Clintberg will cook for or with a series of guests. The residency will culminate in a presentation of their research findings at the gallery.

With this project, Zoë Chan and Mark Clintberg are interested in thinking about everyday cooking as a potential parallel model for art and curatorial practices, or as a way of working that disrupts the constant search for newness, originality, and innovation as they are commonly defined and encouraged in the contemporary art world. While these notions may be appreciated in everyday cooking, value is often predominantly articulated across such factors as sociocultural, economic, and geographic contexts, questions of availability and necessity, notions of hospitality, sociability, pleasure, tradition, and ritual, and a consideration of the tastes and needs of the person cooked for.

Both artists and art historians will examine various texts, cookbooks, films, and memoirs around food and cooking, food photography, food illustration, and food blogs. Informal discussions will investigate the role of memory in relation to food and cooking; the genre of food and travel memoirs; notions of hospitality, generosity, and etiquette; the impact of social, cultural, and economic factors on cooking; hybrid and migrant food production and adaptation; questions of privilege, exoticism, class, taste, and so on. Throughout their research, Chan and Clintberg will raise the question: what can we learn from everyday cooking and apply to our artistic and cultural practices on a conceptual and practical level?

Follow their research on their blog.

 

Zoë Chan is interested in questions of identity, representation, and narrativity as they are articulated within contemporary art practices and popular culture. She is currently a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant to Curators and Critics. In fall 2014, she will guest curate a group exhibition entitled Bande à part / Kids these days on artists for the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop's University (Sherbrooke, Québec). In 2012, she curated Personal Mythologies, featuring artists Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo and Marigold Santos, which was presented at the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels). Notably, between 2006 and 2010, she was visual arts programmer for the MAI where she worked on projects by emerging artists such as Brendan Fernandes, Jérôme Havre, Karen Tam, Brendan Tang, and Howie Tsui. As critic, she has written reviews for Canadian Art, C Magazine, Esse, ETC, and Ricepaper. Zoë Chan has a Master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University. 

 

Mark Clintberg is an artist who works in the field of art history, and curates exhibitions. He is based in Montreal, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. in Art History at Concordia University in 2013. Public and private collections across Canada and in the United States – including the National Gallery of Canada and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts – have acquired his work. His work has recently been shown with Fogo Island Arts (Newfoundland), at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (Calgary), AXENÉ07 (Gatineau), and Trap\door Artist Run Centre (Lethbridge). In 2014 he is presenting projects at Western Front (Vancouver), SNAP (Edmonton), the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), and Articule (Montreal). A new iteration of his collaboration with Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Garde Rose, will take place in Berlin in Summer 2014. In 2013 he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award.

Special projects  

Participating Artists: Zoë Chan (Montréal) Mark Clintberg (Montréal)
Curator(s):
Credits: