Leisure Gallery

A Line is a vitrine installation by Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley). The short video and take-away poster is inspired by Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s propositional action, Caminhando (Walking), 1963.

 A Line is part of Carruthers’ and Wesley’s ongoing investigation of collaborative process. Other works in this series include Folie à deux, 2009, on […]

Oversized silver corsages, flocked cocktail aprons, curlers & cocktails highlight this afternoon event. Inspired by the hopeful glamour of 1950’s Christmas, Leisure members spend days baking in heels and exploring the granny-hairdressing underbelly of Montreal. Tricia Middleton elaborates on the festive theme with her pink cotton ball- tree extravaganza. Less Recent: Back-to-School Special

Canadian publishers had jumped on the bandwagon of printed Christmas cards as early as the 1870s to compete with foreign printers. This card is cited as the earliest known Canadian-produced Christmas card. Montreal and Toronto boasted printing or publishing companies that considered Christmas cards an essential part of their business. Montreal’s firms were G. & […]

« la Chambre bleue d’Arthénice » Salon de Madame de Rambouillet LADIES MOBILIZE THEIR LIVING ROOMS By the seventeenth century, the salon had become an entrenched part of French society and intellectual life and had also come to have a serious influence on politics and the arts. Famed hostesses such as Madame de Rambouillet would […]

Leisure is pleased to announce the opening of the Candice Tarnowski exhibition Blankety Blank at the Toronto Harbourfront York Quay Centre. The exhibition is located in the Project Window at the west side of the York Quay Centre and is accompanied by a brief text by Leisure’s own Susannah Wesley. WRAPPED UP IN THE POSSIBILITIES […]

Leisure Projects was pleased to participate in a casual interview over lunch and tea with the Montreal Gazette reporter Christine Redfern. An excerpt from the article published in the January 17 issue is copied here. Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley are the twosome behind the Montreal curatorial collective Leisure Projects. I spoke with them earlier this week […]

”…with pieces of blue, white and deep red glass like in a western, the filtered light from the ceiling’s marble coffers and the undersides of the translucent tables gave you the sense of well-being. You sipped your drink like a disillusioned pleaure-seeker. The ice cubes in your glass seemed to warm themselves in the magnificent […]

Exerpt: Casid, Jill H. “Queer(y)ing Georgic: Utility, Pleasure, and Marie-Antoinette’s Ornamented Farm” “Rather than start with a site that would signify “pure” farm, I take up in this essay the historic example of the farm gone bad, Marie-Antoinette’s ornamented farm, the Hameau at Versailles. It is the contention of this essay that mucking around in […]

Leisure Projects celebrates the newest addition to our collection, a small etching of tools from the French wig trade circa 1780, with the quote below from Theodor Adorno . ”(…) Everybody must have projects all of the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure. This is planned, used for undertakings, crammed with visits to […]

Leisure Research and Development Residency As the first recipients of the Leisure Research and Development Residency, Jesse Ash and Simon Clark spent four days in Ontario cottage country, pursuing their interest in cultural landscape research while engaging in conversation, leisure sport and festive decoration. In a recent Articule Special Project Ash & Clark performed Broadcast […]