Showcase Exhibition - At the Table | Jeannette Sirois

WHEN
JULY 3 ― 27, 2026

WHERE
Mahon Hall Stage

Opening Reception
JULY 3  |  6 ― 8 PM

Artist Talk
JULY 5  |  2 ― 3 PM

At the Table: The Architecture of Control is a large-scale portrait installation examining the systems — legal, medical, bureaucratic, and religious — through which queer and trans lives have been administered, classified, and governed without the presence of the people those systems regulate.

At the centre of the work are twelve portrait drawings, each 40 × 60 inches, rendered in layered coloured pencil on paper mounted to aluminum panels. The figures are drawn at approximately twice life size, occupying the scale historically reserved for heads of state, judges, and institutional leaders — those whose authority has been made permanent through the tradition of grand manner portraiture. Here, that scale is redirected. The sitters are queer and trans witnesses, positioned at a white administrative table under flat, shadowless institutional lighting that flattens form and refuses the warmth of conventional portraiture.

Before each sitter rests a small arrangement of objects they chose themselves. In grand manner portraiture, objects declare power — sceptres, seals, documents of authority. Here, the objects are different: a dog collar, a textile, a book, a sculpture worn smooth by handling. These are the objects of everyday life. They do not declare institutional authority. They assert presence.

Across each white ground, text authored by the sitter presses forward in dense, unjustified, all- caps blocks set in Helvetica Bold. The text appears fused to the figure, as though emerging from the body rather than sitting behind it. It mimics the visual language of institutional documents — codes, forms, legislation — while carrying personal testimony. It is deliberately difficult to read. Viewers who choose to read must slow down, lean in, and stay. In that sustained looking, a connection forms between viewer and subject that the institutional tradition was never designed to produce.

The installation extends the argument of the portraits into the room itself. A folding table and bolted chair — the kind found in church basements, school gymnasiums, and administrative offices — make exclusion visible as a physical condition. The sitters face the structures that manage their lives. A locked suggestion box positioned beside the table collects visitor responses, carrying them forward as testimonies to each subsequent venue.

Banners hang in the space, each bearing accumulated testimony from previous venues in the same dense typographic language as the portrait backgrounds. These banners form a growing record of public witness — voices collected without guarantee of being heard, now made present.

Together, the portraits, the table, and the banners produce a room in which the architecture of control is made visible, and the people it has governed without consent are the ones holding the room.

Sponsored by Gail Jaeger Architect