The Canadian Architecture Center (CCA) is launching its latest project "Out of the Box", an exhibition dedicated to the works of architect and conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark, whose selected writings, photographs, films, correspondence and works of art were produced between 1969 and 1978.
The Gordon Matta-Clark collection—comprised of writings, photographs, films, correspondence, and select artworks donated to the CCA by the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark—is a fundamental repository of documents and materials connected to finished projects and unrealized pieces. While Matta-Clark’s works were a clear product of his time and environment, the themes he addresses in relation to architecture and urbanism—neglect and speculation, questions of access, corporatization and gentrification, history and memory—are as relevant now as ever.

As part of the CCA´s broader strategy to use its holdings to challenge and redefine the role of architecture today, the Out of the Box format invites three guest curators to explore a specific part of the collection and produce three exhibitions opening up unexplored avenues of inquiry and new critical interpretations. Taken together, these readings, which will also be published in a book in 2020 and further explored in a related round-table seminar, will act as a tridimensional argument about Matta-Clark´s thought and art processes. 

On view between June 2019 and September 2019 the exhibitions are the tangible result of a research program with curators Yann Chateigné, Hila Peleg and Kitty Scott, who have been invited to produce different thematic interpretations contributing and expanding the study of the Matta-Clark´s practice, using the CCA collection as an active tool, with design bu Belgium-based graphic designer Joris Kritis.

In the first exhibition, opening 6 June and titled Material Thinking, curator and art historian Yann Chateigné reflects on the North-American artist’s work through the lens of his highly diverse personal library and sheds light on lesser-known aspects of his practice.

Matta-Clark’s material thinking, stemming from a constellation of unexpected sources, brings together divergent areas of interest while still following particular lines of thought. Criss-crossing the histories of architecture, magic, cognitive science, network theory, anthropology, and ecology, the artist’s library invites an exploration of the hidden aspects of a continuous research process that is reflected in his considerable writing practice and the constant flux of visual investigations through photographs and drawings, as well as in sketches and drafts of concepts for proposed projects.

Through a reversed process that doesn’t simply refer to the documentation of finished works, Chateigné´s research and exhibition reveals a new system of themes and references that lie behind the radical critique of architecture that the artist unfolded during his decade of works; rather than reifying his collaborative process and merely exploring the artist´s visual production, the show highlights the physical, psychological, and conceptual processes behind it. 
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Yann Chateigné
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Collaboratos
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Project direction.- Francesco Garutti. Graphic design.- Joris Kritis. Design.- Anh Truong, Sébastien Larivière. Curatorial research.- Louise Désy, Helina Gebremedhen, Megan Marin.
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Gordon Matta-Clark (born Gordon Roberto Echaurren Matta; June 22, 1943 – August 27, 1978) was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. His parents were artists: Anne Clark, an American artist, and Roberto Matta, a Chilean Surrealist painter, of Spanish and French descent. He was the godson of Marcel Duchamp's wife, Teeny. His twin brother Sebastian, also an artist, committed suicide in 1976.

He studied architecture at Cornell University from 1962 to 1968, including a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied French literature. In 1971, he changed his name to Gordon Matta-Clark, adopting his mother's last name. He did not practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as "Anarchitecture".

Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his "building cuts". He also used puns and other word games as a way to re-conceptualize preconditioned roles and relationships (of everything, from people to architecture).

In February, 1969, the "Earth Art" show, curated by Willoughby Sharp at the invitation of Tom Leavitt, was realized at Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University. Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Willoughby Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition. Sharp then encouraged Gordon Matta-Clark to move to New York City where Sharp continued to introduce him to members of the New York art world. Matta-Clark's work, Museum, at Klaus Kertess' Bykert Gallery, was listed and illustrated on pages 4–5 of Avalanche 1, Fall 1970.

In 1971 Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard co-founded FOOD, a restaurant in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood; managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. The activities at FOOD helped delineate how the art community defined itself in downtown Manhattan. The first of its kind in SoHo, Food became well known among artists and was a central meeting-place for groups such as the Philip Glass Ensemble, Mabou Mines, and the dancers of Grand Union. He ran FOOD until 1973.

In the early 1970s and in the context of his artistic community surrounding FOOD, Matta-Clark developed the idea of "anarchitecture" - a conflation of the words anarchy and architecture - to suggest an interest in voids, gaps, and left-over spaces. With his project Fake Estates, Matta-Clark addressed these issues of non-sites by purchasing at auction 15 leftover and unusably small slivers of land in Queens and Staten Island, New York, for $25–$75 a plot. He documented them through photographs, maps, bureaucratic records and deeds, and spoke and wrote about them - but was not able to occupy these residual elements of zoning irregularities in any other way.

In 1974, he performed a literal deconstruction, by removing the facade of a condemned house along the Love Canal, and moving the resulting walls to Artpark, in his work Bingo.

For the Biennale de Paris in 1975, he made the piece titled Conical Intersect by cutting a large cone-shaped hole through two townhouses dating from the 17th century in the market district known as Les Halles which were to be knocked down in order to construct the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou.

For his final major project, Circus or The Caribbean Orange (1978), Matta-Clark made circle cuts in the walls and floors of a townhouse next-door to the first Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, building (237 East Ontario Street), thus altering the space entirely.

Following his 1978 project, the MCA presented two retrospectives of Matta-Clark's work, in 1985 and in 2008. The 2008 exhibition You Are the Measure included never-before-displayed archival material of his 1978 Chicago project. You Are the Measure traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
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Yann Chateigné ir a writer, curator and professor at the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD-Genève). He previously served as dean of Visual Arts at HEAD-Genève and chief curator at CAPC in Bordeaux. Previous projects include Bringing Something Back, Bergen Kunsthall (2018), Seismology, Palais de Toky, Paris (2013) and IAO. Psychedelic Explorations in France, 1968, CAPC (2008). His writings have appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Mousse and Spike. He is also co-editor of The Archive as a Produce Space of Conflict (Sternberg Press, 2016).
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