Opening a Dossier–Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN
Attention to documentation, to note-taking, to the archive—both the artist’s in her own time, and ours, today—reveals the textures of details seemingly insignificant or the affects of interpersonal exchange in moments otherwise fleeting.
We open a dossier to think alongside Tina Girouard: SIGN IN, on view from September 20, 2024, to January 12, 2025, in these “pages.” Taking the artist’s archive and the exhibition itself as points of departure, this suite of texts, close readings, and conversations published over the course of the exhibition invites further reflection on Girouard’s practice and the networks of artistic production and memory-keeping that continue to shape our understanding of her work today.
Girouard’s performances lent themselves naturally to photographic documentation. Across decades of her work, the camera was an active presence and accompaniment—a tool for making visible the relations that made and unmade a work, the materials deployed, and the spaces in which life and art unfolded. In the archive, photography sits alongside other incomplete records of a life and practice: notes by the artist that articulate how performance participants should move through space, fragments of long-held friendships, grant applications, ideations for uncompleted projects. Attention to documentation, to note-taking, to the archive—both the artist’s in her own time, and ours, today— reveals the textures of details seemingly insignificant or the affects of interpersonal exchange in moments otherwise fleeting. Such documents, ordinarily the stuff of institutional papers or exhibition vitrines, have been meaningfully animated in the care and stewardship of Girouard’s niece, Amy Bonwell, and the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought's committed and longstanding engagement with Girouard’s work, manifested in this exhibition.
Writer and artist Hervé Guibert reminds us that “Photography is also an act of love.” So too, are the archives that constitute an artist’s legacy. In this collection of newly commissioned essays and conversations, artists, writers, historians, and former friends and collaborators of Girouard’s have been invited to respond both to a selection of materials from her archive on view in the exhibition, and to recurring concerns spanning her larger body of work. Their contributions, ranging from essays on maintenance to interviews on experimental archival practice, draw attention to aspects of Girouard and her contemporaries’ practices such as arts administration, symbology and scoring, architecture and infrastructure, and the sociality of performance. In their reflections, they also expand beyond Girouard’s work to ask questions about the boundaries of a singular artist’s legacy, illuminating the collaborations, connections, and concerns that shape and house experiments in art-making and living—the very questions Girouard engaged with persistence throughout her life.
