Exhibition
Staged as a board room, with a series of landscape paintings on the walls, the exhibition included a series of documents that showed Lassonde’s local philantrhopic activity, alongside the counter-transactions that I initiated as part of my work. I redistributing my grant as a form of counter-philanthropy to amplify testimony and critical positions negatively affected by the influence of wealth on art, the environment, and indigenous survival. By using my funding to draw attention to these critical perspectives, my work also indicated the underlying ways that philanthropy is always used to rehabilitate the reputations of the donor class.
One of the transactions comprising my work took the form of a selection of books critical of the impacts of Canadian mining, that I purchased and donated to Mount Allison University library. An inset custom bookplate attributes the collection as an artwork held within the library, and the printed bibliography was available in the exhibition.