The Margin Maker was a collaborative installation created with Pascaline Knight and presented in Montreal at Arprim, centre d'essai en art imprimé in 2023.
Pascaline and I inverted, condensed, and disassembled the Hilroy Canada Exercise Book, used by many students in their primary grade studies. The starting point of the exhibition was the idea to create a useless Margin Making device, which would endlessly create an unusable margin:
Pascaline used the device to create multiple studies and arrangements of the resulting artifacts, and used them to reflect on her printmaking practice. For my part, I created a series of harmonographs which cased the ruled line to fold over itself with attendee participation:
From the intro of the exhibition text by Justine Kohleal:
Is the margin impassable? It structures the page, certainly, acting as a guide for our hand while we scribble our notes or, as children, learn to write cursive. Pascaline Knight’s long-standing interest in the Hilroy Canada Exercise Book, manufactured in Mississauga, Ontario and a staple in Canadian classrooms for decades, is transformed through collaboration with Max Lupo into a tripartite meditation on space, time, and the body—and the ways in which our corporatized nation state enacts order on all three. Indeed, one becomesmarginal when they are unable to follow ‘acceptable’ socio-cultural margins. If structural forces (judicial, educational, familial, political) orient citizens, pointing them in particular directions by imposing lines of thinking as well as parameters of movement, Knight and Lupo’s Margin Maker (2020-ongoing) reminds us that there is not only a rhythm to writing, but a rhythm to the margin, also. When its glitches, errors, and failures are made felt, or visible, the margin becomes porous, a liminal space, or impasse, that asks us to become attentive to small changes—to see possibility in ordinary life ...
