Eli Kerr and Frédéric Gagnon, Photo: Valérian Mazataud (le Devoir)
Interview with Eli Kerr by Anaïs Castro
In late February, Eli Kerr unveiled his third space in Montreal. His journey began in 2015 when, alongside Daphné Boxer, he transformed an auto-body garage into VIE D’ANGE, showcasing site-responsive commissions until 2019. Amidst the pandemic in 2020, Kerr inaugurated Parc Offsite, a precursor to his eponymous gallery. Now, having relocated to a larger venue in Montreal’s main avenue, Kerr’s endeavors continue to flourish. Notably, his artist Joyce Joumaa presents a new body of work in Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale exhibition this year. Returning to Liste Art Fair in June for the second time, Galerie Eli Kerr is eager to introduce Maggy Hamel-Metsos’s work to an international audience.
Anaïs Castro: What made you want to open a gallery under your own name after running Vie d’Ange and Parc Offsite?
Eli Kerr: After a decade of doing project spaces and proposing more experimental contexts for exhibition-making, it became clearer to me that building a gallery allows for the kind of curatorial work I wanted to do. I have the great privilege and responsibility of working closely with artists, and working under one’s own name demonstrates my commitment to that.
Our mission is both artist-driven and publicly orientated. We are in close dialogue with our artists in all stages of production and our efforts are dedicated to supporting their work.
The programme has some strong post-conceptual lines and as we work to advance a dialectical reading of art and its role in society. The gallery consists of 9 artists whom I’ve come to know over years through my prior projects, and a strength of the gallery is its intergenerational quality. We have an artist born in every decade from the late 50s, 60s, 70s, mid 80s, while 4 artists are born after 1994.
AC: You recently moved into a new space on St-Laurent, can you describe the new space and the significance of the move to your gallery’s evolution?
EK: Firstly, I’d say that this progression in the gallery is not just about space, it is also mobilized by the fact that Frédéric Gagnon has joined the gallery as a Partner. The synergy of working as two allows the gallery to set forward a more complex position, both intellectually and operationally.
The Avenue du Parc space was 30 square metres while the Saint-Laurent gallery is now 140 and so there is a lot more that can happen. We are having artist talks, book launches and events that accentuate our exhibition programme, nurturing a discursive and public aspect of what the gallery can do.
The space has a precise volume that is fertile for sculpture, and I would say that many of the gallery artists have a spatial and even installative aspect to their work. First and foremost the gallery needs to accommodate, encourage and anticipate the needs of its artists, and so when we saw this space it was about imagining the potential of what our artists might do.
AC: Transitioning to your participation in Liste Art Fair in Basel, what drew your gallery to participate in this fair in particular?
EK: It will be our second time showing at Liste, and it’s an important context for us as it provides an opportunity to make rigorous presentations and immerse our artists in an international conversation. As a gallery in Canada there is such integration within the United States context, almost a gravitational pull south. Liste is a rencontre for young like-minded galleries, and so we are enmeshed in a truly international and contemporary context. The visitors that come to the fair are also fantastic but when I think of this fair what comes to mind first is the time we spend with other galleries and the culture of collegiality in the hall.
AC: How do you pick which artist and work you bring to an art fair?
EK: We put a lot into our fair presentations. At Liste last year we commissioned a text by the art historian Vincent Bonin to be paired with Simon S. Belleau’s presentation. This year Renaud Gadoury, an up-and-coming scholar studying at ENS Paris will write for Maggy-Hamel Metsos’s presentation. I will start thinking about what we want to do at a specific fair over a year in advance. I want to continue to focus on solo projects at fairs. There is a certain orchestration to sync up a fair presentation with what’s coming up in the gallery, or ahead of a significant exhibition for the artist. In the context of Liste, we are even thinking about the continuity between our presentation last year and this year, to continue conversations about text and technology that are important to our artists.
Art fairs, for all that they are, are quite complex social and economic instruments.
If a fair happens at a convention centre, we can say then that the art fair is where art becomes conventional! And so, in regard to the homogenization we see play out in art – there is a lot at stake in fairs as marketplaces and how they impact the broader production of visual culture, considering that fairs influence what gets shown in galleries, what is collected by museums, and increasingly, what artists produce.
I think to make a successful presentation at a fair you have to, to the best of your abilities, resist the cynicism and pressure that can seep in from the dynamics of the market. Mindful participation in this process of ‘what becomes conventional’ is important for a gallery. You have to make a statement.
AC: You will be showcasing the work of Maggy Hamel-Metsos. What can you tell us about her work?
EK: For the past year Maggy has been collecting objects that she describes as being ‘in limbo’ – metal household wares, that have fallen out of context, finding themselves in junk shops, auctions, or outright abandoned. She has been taking these objects, arranging them together. Sometimes single objects, and other times multiple objects of the same metal. She then melts them down into an ingot. She’ll subsequently letter punch a description of the contents back onto its surface. The result yields text-based works that speak to time and the space between vitality and memory.
She’s an artist that’s always been interested in monumentality, provenance, and symbolism, with a sense for translating literary form through a sculptural lens. I’m excited to introduce her work to a European audience and for curators to discover her exhibition projects, the thinking in the studio, through the presentation we’ll make at the fair.
Her sense of poetics and capacity to make powerful experiences through sculpture, space and image is quite singular. The notion of scale and measure in her oeuvre is not unlike her imagination. Her ideas are deeply inspiring for me, and through showing her work I’ve seen how her works also resonate deeply with others. Maggy has made great intellectual contributions to the gallery, the conversations we have for future works she wants to make keep me looking to the horizon.