Read-In

Join us to further engage with Pansee Atta, Stephanie Vegh, and Florence Yee's group exhibition Encylopedias. 

Read-In is a reading salon series featuring a selection of short texts recommended by artists of Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre’s current exhibitions (and occasionally staff). Participants will take turns reading the texts out loud, and an informal discussion of the texts will follow. Hosted by Modern Fuel, the goal of this program is to connect our audience and the general public with our programming by collectively engaging with some of the knowledges, observations, and urgent issues explored in the exhibitions and how they manifest in the everyday. The reading list will be updated and shared on this page after each meeting.

Free and open to all. Copies of the texts will be handed out at each session. Light refreshments will be served.

About the exhibition: 

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.