Annotate This! is a curated exhibition that investigates language and text and its relationship to artmaking and the library as a site. Using the location of Concordia University’s Webster Library, these site-specific text-based pieces explore the cultural and grammatical structure of language, the ambiguity of fragmented type and the play found within graphic text. The artworks are exhibited in display vitrines and show a range of media from printmaking, ceramics, painting, fibre arts, photography and video. The show runs from April 6th to June 28th, 2023. This exhibition began with a prompt: What does language as aesthetic mean to you? Each member of the artist collective [UN]PROMPTU was asked to create an artwork as a response. The result is a visual poem of artworks that reacts and responds to the library as a site. This exhibition continues a tradition of conceptual artists turning to text, such as the American artists Barbara Kruger, John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. The goal of the exhibition is to create new work in the present to imagine what text-based art could look like in the future. This question is especially poignant in a world that continues to replace printed matter with digital archives, and the handwritten and hand painted with their virtual counterparts.

Annotate This! is an exhibition by the artist collective [UN]PROMPTU, which is committed to help emerging artists receive recognition for their work. The six members of the collective are all emerging artists from an array of disciplines, such as painting, ceramics, photography, and textiles. Fractured, fragmented, playing with structure of language in various media allows this exhibition to explore many of the facets and nuances within this project. Palimpsests, illegibility, ambiguity, and the nuances of different languages are important themes that are reappropriated, toyed with, and fused with new ideas in unique and challenging ways. However, we do not intend to put words in your mouth, but instead invite criticism and discussion, in the hope that you, the viewer, will feel inspired, even urged to Annotate This.

The exhibition ran from April 6th to June 28th, 2023. On opening night an artist talk and screening took place from 7 – 8:30PM @ The Webster Library (2nd Floor, Room LB-207) in 1400 Maisonneuve Blvd West.

Featuring works by Abby Brock, Keza Gahisha-Morin, Sierra Koritko, Rennie Taylor, Anika Poch-McKee, and Adey Singer.