Manif d’art 7
The Québec city Biennial
May–June 2014

Director/Curator of the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Vicky Chainey Gagnon is renowned for her innovative approach and interest in emerging artistic practices. Her research into citizen museology has led her to explore new forms of cultural mediation, recently presented within the framework of a series of exhibitions. In 2011, Chainey Gagnon was awarded the Prix Relève by the Société des musées québécois in recognition of the contribution of her work to the advancement of Québec museology.

A theme centred around resistance
The main lines of the Manif d’art 7, as defined by guest curator Vicky Chainey Gagnon, will be developed around the theme of resistance. The exhibition starts with a consideration that the visual and media arts have played a critical role in documenting conflict and resistance. As the curator points out, their contribution to the expression of personal views on politics, war, social inequities, and the human condition will also be examined: “Worrisome trends exist today such as extreme fundamentalism, euphoric speculation and consumerism, combined with mass unemployment, banking crises, and overheated stock markets, notwithstanding ecological duress. In the context of a very recent global economic meltdown, the time is right to look at contemporary artistic productions that speak to articulations of resistance today.”

Curator biography
Vicky Chainey Gagnon is Director/Curator at the university-based Foreman Art Gallery located in Sherbrooke, Québec. She holds a BFA in Film and Art History (Concordia University, Sherbrooke, 1999) and a MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (York University, Toronto, 2005). Until 2011, she pursued doctoral research at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture on the subject of civically engaged museology, where she received several grants including the Fonds québécois de la recherche en société et culture and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Since 2005, Vicky Chainey Gagnon has organized projects for the Foreman Art Gallery such as Time Inside the Image I-III; Above and Below (Adam David Brown, Martha Fleming/Lyne Lapointe, Inger Lise Hansen, Véronique La Perrière M., Penelope Stewart, Irene F. Whittome); Christina Battle: Filing Memory; Charles Stankievech: Over the Rainbow, Under the Radar; Value (Cooke-Sasseville, Antoni Muntadas, Red Channels, Anton Vidokle & Julieta Aranda, WochenKlausur)and the international residency series How Does Art Teach?. Her essays and texts have appeared in ETC, Curator: The Museum Journal and publications by the Art Gallery of York University and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In 2012, Vicky Chainey Gagnon is participating in the residency The Decapitated Museum at the Banff Centre for the Arts.