Encyclopedias
Pansee Atta, Stephanie Vegh, and Florence Yee – 2019
Encyclopedias brings together works by Pansee Atta, Stephanie Vegh, and Florence Yee that interrogate established repositories of knowledge. Through montage, collage, reproduction, drawing, and writing, the artists in this exhibition stage material interventions into artifacts, encyclopedias, and textbooks.
Atta, in the video Earthenware, examines colonization and collection, ‘High Art’ and ‘craft’, objects and the places in which they are produced.
Vegh, in the installation A World Without Watergate, makes incisions in encyclopedias to reveal an inescapable circularity in history when viewed from today’s perspective.
Yee, in the charcoal drawing series A History of Canadian Art History, scrutinizes the role of art publications in developing canons, as well as the marked absence and selective presence of women, Indigenous Peoples, and people of colour therein.
Collectively, the works in this exhibition move beyond the putative objectivity of “encyclopedias” to ask how our understandings of cultures and histories are learned and how they might be critically unlearned.
About the Artists
Pansee Atta, Stephanie Vegh, and Florence Yee—
Pansee Atta is an Ottawa-based Egyptian-Canadian artist, curator, and activist whose work considers themes of colonization, feminism, and Muslim representation, as well as the role of cultural institutions in legacies of epistemic violence. Previous residencies include the Impressions Residency at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the SparkBox Studio Award, and at the Atelier of Alexandria. Previous exhibitions have taken place at Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Z Art Space in Montreal, and others. She is currently completing a doctoral program in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin nation.
—
Stephanie Vegh is a visual artist, writer and arts worker who obtained her Combined Honours BA in Art and Comparative Literature from McMaster University before completing her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. She served as Artist-in- Residence at the Repton School in Derbyshire, England and has written essays and reviews for various galleries and publications in the United Kingdom and Canada. Her drawing and installation projects have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at public art galleries in Canada and the UK including the Leeds College of Art & Design and Tramway in the UK, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Workers Arts & Heritage Centre, Earls Court Gallery, Hamilton Artists Inc. and Centre 3 for Print and Media Arts in Canada. Vegh is an active arts advocate who was awarded the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Arts Management in 2016 for her leadership of the Hamilton Arts Council (2011-2017), and is a three-time recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Project Grant for Visual Artists.
—
Florence Yee is a 2.5 generation, Cantonese-struggling visual artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Their interest in Cantonese-Canadian history has informed an art practice examining diasporic subjectivities through the lens of gender, racialization, queerness and language. Notable exhibitions include Sino(n)-Québécoise? at Centre Never Apart and Le Salon at Articule, as well as exhibitions at the Gardiner Museum (2019), A Space (2019), Art Mûr (2018), the Karsh-Masson Gallery (2017), Studio XX (2016). They have participated in residencies at the Gay Archives of Quebec, the John and Maggie Mitchell Art Gallery, La Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario and, the Ottawa School of Art, and the Fine Arts Reading Room. Having graduated with a BFA from Concordia University, they are now pursuing an MFA at OCAD U in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design as a SSHRC recipient and Delaney Scholar. They are represented by Studio Sixty-Six.