Rebecca Duclos curates Telepathic Drawing Session

MFA Director Rebecca Duclos will work with artists Donna Akrey, Jon Knowles, and Leah Garnett for a one night performance in Montreal this March.

Telepathic Drawing Session
Articule | Montreal
March 24-27, 2010

I’d say I’m transmitting it. If someone picks it up, then that’s communication. Someone might pick it up a thousand years from now. Someone might pick it up five minutes before I’ve thought about it. You see, because that sort of transcends time and space, and these things sort of exist for all time, so to speak.

Robert Barry speaking with Patricia Norvell about his telepathic pieces, May 30th 1969

“Black Holes 2008″ by Leah Garnett

Telepathic Drawing Session is a modest (if not largely invisible) project which brings together fascinations with extra-sensory perception, preoccupations with conceptual art, and a special interest in the expansiveness of Canadian geography and its scalar restraints on collaborative artistic practice. Rebecca Duclos’ proposal results from of a series of explorations that have brought together research on the 1960s telepathy works of Robert Barry with Ted Serios’ parallel experiments in photographie de la pensée in order to propose a project in which telepathic communication is used to generate images between remote individuals. Telepathic Drawing Session proposes a new model for a thoughtful, collaborative art practice that strives to overcome the pesky limits of time and space—so long a perennial problem for Canadian artists hoping to work with one another across provincial boundaries without the financial assistance of travel grants, the luxury of residencies, or access to unlimited Air Miles. Duclos will work with artists Donna Akrey, Jon Knowles, and Leah Garnett for a one night performance in which drawings will be transmitted between Montreal, Quebec and Sackville, New Brunswick using telepathy and live radio broadcasts.