Current Residencies
Curator in Residence: Sylvie Fortin
November 10 - December 10, 2025
Sylvie Fortin is an interdependent curator, researcher, writer, and editor based in Montréal and Buenos Aires. She was Curator-in-Residence (2019–21) at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, USA; Executive/Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal (2013–17); Executive Director/Editor of ART PAPERS, Atlanta (2004–12). Fortin lectures internationally. Her writings have been published widely, including in Artforum, ART PAPERS, Art Press, Art Review, e-flux Criticism, and Frieze.
In 2017, Fortin began a long-term, interdisciplinary, itinerant curatorial inquiry into the currencies of hospitality. She now realizes it will be a lifelong project.
Focusing on the debt that economics and finance owe to hospitality, her current research is carried out through curatorial residencies and the realization of Transitive Properties, a long-term mobile platform hosting undisciplined artists/thinkers and supporting their open-ended research and production. In the process, it redistributes resources and fosters contagious social experimentation, aiming, on a small scale, to realize alternative worldings.
Photo credit: C. Daniel Dawson
Griffin x ECU Fellowship Studio Award Winner: Claudia Goulet-Blais
September 1 - December 31, 2025
Sunday, November 30 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM – Artist Talk: Live from the Studio (via Zoom)
Sunday, December 14 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM – Open Studio (at Griffin Art Projects)
Claudia Goulet-Blais, Hidden Daughter series from mère-fille: an archive of care, 2025, Image courtesy of the Artist
Claudia Goulet-Blais research focuses on maternal relationships, exploring the complexities of care and the shifting roles within family dynamics. During her Griffin residency, Claudia has been working closely with her mother to create a new series of images, while also drawing from historical archives to explore how memory and familial relationships are inscribed through photographic and material forms. The work draws inspiration from 19th-century hidden mother photography, exploring the tensions of physical and emotional proximity and distance, reflecting on mortality and loss, and examining the historical undervaluing of women’s care work. Her new research has included reading Susan Sontag’s On Women and Annie Parsons’s The Choreography of Everyday Life, which inform her reflections on the body’s language, intimacy, selfhood, and intergenerational connection. Shaped by acceptance, refusal, and transformation, the figures in her work remain intentionally ambiguous in their identities and roles.
At Open Studios, Claudia will present a range of new material and conceptual experiments, including an in-progress porcelain sculpture and her new photographic series.
Bio
Claudia Goulet-Blais (b. 1996, Montréal) is a Vancouver-based photo installation artist whose practice centres on intergenerational kinship and performing for the camera with those close to her. Working with analog photography, ceramics, and archival imagery, she creates photographs and sculptural works reflecting relational dynamics through body language, and gesture. Her work investigates aging, shared memory, and the labour of care, engaging photography as image and object. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and has exhibited at FOFA Gallery, Unit_302, and Gallery 881, with residencies at NES (Skagastrond), Similkameen (Okanagan), and Griffin Art Projects (Vancouver).