The Tenant
The Tenant / Le Locataire was a solo exhibition at Centre Clark, an artist run centre in Montreal that has been renting in its current Mile End neighbourhood location for the past twenty years. Over that time, the area around the gallery transformed from a declining industrial wasteland to a fashionable hub of the new media economy; between these poles was a decade in which the Mile End supported a thriving artists' neighbourhood, when rent was affordable, and studio space was easy to find.
The work undertook an archaeology of the gallery and its location, seeking to recognize the economic conditions produced by the gallery and the community of affiliated artists, looking at the gentrification of a neighbourhood through the lens of a single urban address and its artist-tenants.
As Saelan Twerdy writes in C Magazine, The Tenant, “highlights the ethical contortions that cultural workers are forced into by the imperatives of a fundamentally predatory economy.”