Ghosts 2025

A curatorial intervention at the UQO Gallery (2023-2025): unveiling. From March 2023 to May 2025, Galerie UQO undertook a bold experiment: it invited Patrice Loubier to take the gallery itself as the object and context of his “curatorial intervention.” Rather than conceiving an exhibition to be subsequently presented by the gallery, the idea was to develop a project that would work from within the institution—treating its components and the day-to-day work of its team as direct opportunities for creation by invited artists. Over the past two years, technical equipment, staff meetings, internal communications, and team routines have thus become the subject and material of works realized by the curator and the artists he brought into the fold: Guillaume Clermont, Chloe Desjardins, Laurent Marissal, and Anouk Verviers. Developed within the very spaces and operational flow of the gallery, these interventions largely escaped public view. This exhibition revisits the long-term exploratory project to finally reveal the ins and outs of this unique experiment. In her project Ghosts, Chloe Desjardins creates replicas of tools and office supplies commonly used in art institutions, which are then discreetly inserted into the gallery’s workspaces to be discovered by staff in the course of their daily tasks. These ghost objects often went unnoticed for quite some time, even by people with eyes sharpened through years of close contact with visual art—until they were caught off guard by sculptures they unwittingly tried to use! The playful nature of Ghosts is paired with a critical dimension: it exposes the “blind” automatism of familiar gestures and the dulled attention brought on by routine—conditions under which a sculpture can easily be mistaken for a real object.