April 9 to 12, 2026
The artist’s presence to perform scheduled maintenance is:
Friday, April 10 @ 5:00 pm – Saturday, April 11 @ 1:00 pm – Sunday, April 12 @ 3:00 pm
Unanticipated tower activities will require the artist to perform unscheduled maintenance.
The Grand Quai, 200 de la Commune St. W. Montreal, QC H2Y 0B8
Plural Art Fair – Beyond the Booths
Almost immediately after the construction or creation of a thing it begins to transform through decay or deterioration – everything does and nothing is forever, except required maintenance.
To maintain the thing as it deteriorates is a means to prolong use, value, and function, to apply care and nurturing, and, when the thing is considered useful and valuable enough, the cycle of maintenance continues.
Scholes invites us to confront what we often overlook and the quiet operations that sustain the objects and systems we rely upon. His works insist that material is never inert and always carries traces of use, care, and decay, with cycles of making and unmaking inseparable from our shared realities.
(This is) What happens when a thing is maintained (?) is comprised of three towers constructed with over 1500 hollow cast beeswax bricks, each 20 x 8.5 x 5.5 cm with three core holes. The towers are stand-ins for the architectural and infrastructural structures that contain, protect and support societal needs as well as representing the things created for cultural purposes. Collectively the bricks maintain the continuity and strength of the tower. As bricks become compromised the overall integrity is sacrificed risking structural collapse. When the towers fall apart, maintenance is performed. Bricks are sorted to rebuild the towers. Those broken are put aside. With each repair, the perpetual transformation impacts the size of the towers, as the pile of refuse slowly grows.
Beeswax is the material product of the labour of female worker honeybees, whose waxy abdominal secretions are masticated and molded into the hexagonal cells used for incubating eggs and for the storage of pollen and honey. The wax is essential to the very creation and sustainment of the hive and itself a metaphor for maintenance – the mundane, repeated, hygienic, nurturing, care required of all social structures. Beeswax has strength in the delicate, sensual, skin-like and luminous fluctuations between malleable to brittle – it scars and cracks yet can be reformed, used to rebuild.
(This is) What happens when a thing is maintained (?) marks the cycles of attention required and the transformations evidenced as a thing moves through the perpetual rotation of deterioration and maintenance.
Exhibition provenance – (This is) what happens when a thing is maintained (?)
2004 – Montréal (QC), Square Viger, DARE-DARE center d’art multidisciplinaire (Sep 9 – Oct 16)
2007 – Calgary (AB), Olympic Plaza, The Visual Arts Week Society (Sep 7 – 16)
2008 – Barrie (ON), MacLaren Art Center (Jun 12 – Aug 31)
2008 – Pointe-Claire (QC), Stewart Hall Art Gallery (Jul 6 – Aug 24)
2020 – Montréal (QC), Atwater Market, la Ville de Montréal & DARE-DARE (Sep 10 – Oct 28)
2026 – Montréal (QC), Galerie Robertson Arès (Jan 24 – Feb 21)
2026 – Montréal (QC), Grand quai, Plural contemporary art fair (Apr 9 – 12)
Installations with links to project pages
oies actives et sécuritaires – Œuvres et installations artistiques and DARE DARE, Montréal, QC 2020
