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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2006 |
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Modulateur luso chromatique "Isn't the really absurd thing to have objects (paintings) representing other objects? Must a painting always be like an actor, playing the part of another...I believe that whenever a painting includes an image-linked proposition, expression is diverted from its essential goal. My expression is situated in the events that take place between the spectator (perceiver) and the object (In other words, the painting 'happens' in people's heads)" (Normand Thériault, Claude Tousignant : a text in two parts) Claude Tousignant The influential art practice of Claude Tousignant can be understood not only in terms of geometric abstraction but also as investigation, experiment and research. His work today continues to resonate in our contemporary discourse around the possibilities and impossibilities of the white cube and its relationship with debates surrounding the definition of the art object. In 1959, on the occasion of the mounting of the exhibition, Art Abstrait at the École des Beaux Arts in Montreal, Claude Tousignant, declared "What I wish to do is to make painting objective, to bring it back to its source - where only painting remains, emptied of all extraneous matter - to the point at which painting is pure sensation". (Claude Tousignant, "Pourune peinture évidentielle") Thus began Tousignant's rigorous abstraction of medium. Widely known for his geometric abstraction paintings, including his circle series, " Gongs" and "Bull's Eyes" , Tousignant's practice has moved in a trajectory from Monochrome orangé (1956), to a progressive investigation of the spatial relationship between painting and the white cube. This examination of the implied relationship between form and space has culminated in his extension toward the sculptural field. For the exhibition at Art Mûr, Tousignant's installation, Modulateur luso chromatique , consists of a selection of eight sculptures in a series of numbered "Modulateur de lumière". The works invite the viewer to experience the relationship between the forms and the gallery walls, floors, the ceiling and passageways. Michèle Thériault, curator for Tousignant's 2005 solo exhibition at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, has proposed that Tousignant is in fact presenting "prismatic" viewing conditions where at every turn transformations of a visual, spatial and corporeal nature take place." (Michèle Thériault, 3 paintings, 1 sculpture, 3 spaces) In this way the physical space of Art Mûr as white cube is particularly interesting with its exposed beams, varying wall angles and openings which allow for potential and possibility in an interaction between the rooms and Tousignant's work. Each sculpture is acrylic on aluminum, of the same height (112") with variances in width and most significantly, colour. In an investigation of the effect of spatial dynamics and light on colour, connections can be made with Tousignant's earlier circular forms, described as explorations of colour which "emphasize the harmonious relationships between light and form". (Danielle Corbeille,Claude Tousignant) The interaction between colour and form lends itself to a study of movement, where shadow and light play with the vertical angles as an intervention within the gallery space. Pushing the notion of the painting as autonomous object, these sculptural forms also translate as paintings against a renegotiated space: the fluctuating notion of contemporary white cube. Nonetheless with the base components of these works referencing buildings and building materials, these forms are also a distillation of structure. Here, the recurring tension between painted and sculptural form is evidence of Tousignant's capacity to probe definitions that have not yet been resolved.
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Room 3 Starting Here The banal suburbian environments that form the basis for Gary Evans' visual subjects are eerie in their other worldliness. It is almost like peering into a parallel universe, an inspired visual science fiction. The continuous thread throughout is the luminosity that emanates from within the forms in the works. The sole inhabitants of most works are strange and exotic organic florae. These fantastic environments are an alternative to the humdrum 'real' world spaces that they recall. While in later works, the quoting of urban landscapes drops off in favour of entire other worlds or spaces that consist of imaginative organic forms in the ever same style, full of psychedelic colours, and the almost humming energy exuded from the hazy brushstrokes. Photographic influence in cropping of space plays into the acquisition of these pieces of the world we live in. Much like in a photograph, these stolen images are then transported into a mental work of sorts, distorted by the author of the new image, creating a new space. The contrast between pieces that incorporate urban and suburban aspects, with those that involve exclusively organic micro-worlds is one that highlights the involvement and absence of human activities. There is a more traditional scholarly awareness in the collage of elements found with the examples that feature the parallel urban landscapes, whereas the micro-worlds find themselves heading towards a much more imaginative, utopian field. The lack of animal life in the latter is reminiscent of records of Earth's history, pre-animal, and yet the science fiction-esc aspects would imply future or parallel places, leading one to ponder about the future state of our own world. Both takes on the exhibition of his style display light-hearted playfulness as well as a more serious set off implications. The balance of opposing natures in terms of attitude is further echoed with the balance of the apparent thriving eco-systems in the pieces. This is an enjoyable visual buzz and not to be missed. Text: Lizz Dunlop
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Room 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 Download PDF brochure: size 1Mo
Make me a believer by Andria Hickey Things are not always what they seem. There is never only one version of a story and a sideways glance might reveal more than expected. Between simulation and disappearance, the works presented in the 10 th Anniversary exhibition of Art Mûr play a game with truth, daring the artwork to render the viewer a believer . In an excavation of reality, Art Fiction asks the viewer to pick up the pieces in an examination of the relationship between the artificial and the real. In a collection of works by 28 emerging and senior Canadian artists from the gallery and by invitation, the exhibition challenges the viewer to mine suspended moments for clues of before and after, the secrets of what may have happened and what might be. Together, these works explore latent imaginaries where the interplay of scale, motion and scenario present the viewer with the implied space of possibility. Bringing together a variety of media from photography to installation, sculpture, painting and video, the works in Art Fiction suggests a moment observed, the captured residue of something happening. Moving through the exhibition space, the viewer becomes both reader and writer in a process of re-enchantment where the drama is staged, frozen and suspended. David Sprigg's "Movement" (2003), layers multiple two-dimensional drawings to create a freeze frame of a three-dimensional sculpture, cinematically paused before the viewer. Likewise, the meticulously staged photography of Carlos and Jason Sanchez is itself an exercise in narrative. Between performance and cinema, the Sanchez brothers work facilitates a pathologic architecture of the authentic fake, where each unresolved set calls for circumstance, character, and climax. Similar to a film still, "After the fire" (2005) invites the viewer to be involved in the remains of experience and subsequently in the legitimacy of what is both real and unreal. A negotiation of the relationship between fiction and fact is not only a symptom of the postmodern condition, it is also a compromise of representation. Working in a tradition of photography which proposes a documentation of the unreal, Janeita Eyre's mimetic portraits are "an accumulation of impossible memories". Bringing together personal fictions, mythologies of psychoanalysis, and the pop culture imagery of the everyday; Eyre's portraits are not only the fiction of her "Siamese twin separated at birth" but also a narrative of photographic desire to make the imaginary real. Likewise, Holly King's ethereal landscapes credit the sublime ability of the photograph to entertain the possible reality of fantasy. From the otherworldliness of King's imaginary the exhibition leads the viewer toward rabbit holes of other sorts. Scissors become organic debris, candy becomes a hard to swallow message. Lois Andison's experiments in the impossible lend themselves to uptopian desiresvin "Emerald City" (1999), where within a test tube pedestal a miniature world of glass glows with soft electricity. Guillaume Lachapelle's intricate and miniature theatrical sets are gestures toward fairy tales and comic strips. His figures become strange characters of twisted stories where " dogs wear human masks, humans wear bunny and rhino masks, penises sprout from coat racks and butt-plugs float like balloons" 1. Similarly, Diana Thorneycroft's drawings invert anticipated narratives, placing familiar characters in an unlikely version of the story. The birds-eye perspective of Judith Berri's fictional landscapes entertain the possibility of a topography for fantasy, while Rafael Sottichilito's paintings propose a fluidity between subject and daydream. Yannick Pouliot's installations themselves act as interventions in the gallery space, offering another world, an other space, where the viewer is presented both access and escape. These works not only deconstruct a frame of representation, they are also experimenting in the expectation that contemporary reality is simultaneously version, variation and virtual. That which is unreal is matched with the supra-real. As a spectator of this encounter, the viewer becomes both player and jury in a volley for truth. Like the works in this exhibition, the viewer becomes responsible for a forecast of personal and collective composition of narrative. In a visual world where the boundaries between the artificial and the authentic are continuously renegotiated, what is meant becomes not a function of the real but a credit to the imaginary. Each artist in the exhibition plays with this tension, acknowledging a loss of truth while simultaneously proposing a freedom of possibility in the unreal. For the viewer, each encounter is not without serendipity. The exhibition offers a possibility for re-enchantment in its ability to charm the viewer with illusion. It is not a sentiment of disillusionment or cynicism, but rather a new expectation for art.
1- http://www.montrealmirror.com/2004/112504/artsweek.html. The MirrorARCHIVES: Nov 25-Dec 1.2004 Vol. 20 No. 23. Humans, animals, sex and sculptures. Christine Redfern. |
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Room 1 & 2 Text: Andria Hickey Surrogate Seeing: Éric Raymond Combining electronic technologies with sculptural form, Éric Raymond's work investigates the relative changes in our sense of visual perception. Interested in the origin of images, Raymond's exhibition at Art Mûr features a variety of works which explore the effects of technology on how we envision our contemporary environment. Part of an ongoing project, Lanternes/Lighthouses, Raymond's most recent work, Linescape, features two monitors which robotically move together and apart to reveal a horizontal scan of a landscape. Interested in "the relationships between photography and representations of nature," Raymond questions the technologically constructed idea of landscape, "be it photography in the late 19th, 20th century or space imaging in the early 21st."1. In Linescape the technology is invasive and transformative, completing and undoing the cultural and political representation of the environment in a display of both virtual and artificial vision. Raymond continues to deconstruct images and notions of space using similar display technology in his other installations. Inglomérations/Infill-Rise plays with the façade of utopic desire at Les habitations Jeanne Mance. Like Linescape, the robotically traversing monitors juxtapose a still image of a low-income housing complex with video footage of a building moving from window to an interior movement through hallways and stairs, narrated by the imposing sounds of heavy footsteps. The contrast and movement of the images and monitors merge the urban utopia of the exterior with the institutional despotic of the interior. Raymond's sculptural works also investigate the cultural implications of technologically mediated representations. Mirage features two camel-like figures constructed from motorcycle parts and industrial machinery. The figures peer into a receptacle filled with black ink reflecting lunar images which are projected from two outmoded television monitors suspended and face-down. Combining the constructed materiality of dismantled machines turned animal with imaging mediums, Raymond's installation creates a conceptual relationship between the contemporary machine of vision and the sublime familiarity of technological composed images. The bird's eye perspective imposed upon the viewer further exploits this tension. Similarly, Nature Morte , an earlier piece in the same series, features the underbelly of a deteriorating snowmobile installed against a reproduction of Rembrandt's The Slaughtered Ox (1638). The snowmobile is manipulated to closely resemble the slain carcass of the ox, further juxtaposing past and present, the natural world with the industrial world. Through his innovative use of robotic technologies, external sensors and LCD panels, Raymond's work considers how our culturally produced mechanisms for seeing affect our perception of vision and the subsequent representation of our natural environment. Ultimately, Raymond's electronic sculptural installations work to produce an observation of prosthetic vision. 1.Website of the artist.
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Room 3 Text: Lizz Dunlop This month on exhibit for the first time in Montréal is a series of photographs by Diana Thorneycroft, titled The Doll Mouth Series. The series documents a new direction in the fetishized relationship between the artist and her ever-evolving collection of dolls. The Doll Mouth Series presents an uncanny and haunting study of its subject, no less than characteristic of Thorneycroft's work, what's unusual is the cropping of the images. Extreme close-ups of isolated doll mouths situate the viewer within the personal space of the subjects, without a surrounding frame of reference. This simplification of the overall composition departs from the elaborately orchestrated environments typically found in works from the mid to late nineties by the artist. The intimacy of being so close to the depicted orifice suggests a sharing of intimacy that is not simply physical, perhaps a secret or maybe even something along more sexual lines. In these prints, however the subject is not a sentient being able to engage in any of these activities in a reciprocal fashion. The absurdity and impossibility for the doll mouths to perform the many diverse functions- such as are prescribed to mouths of the living- further complicates the bizarrely ambiguous conundrum of what the viewer is to read from the images. Previous works by Thorneycroft knit together personal and collective memories with the ambiguous to create images that challenge the nature of myth and fantasy, dreams and nightmares. The key roll of dramatic lighting in her work heightens the focus on the individual mouths. In The Doll Mouth Series, one can expect to witness the disturbing, enchanting, and multi-layered style for which Thorneycroft has become internationally renowned. Imbuing objects from the everyday with new meaning and purpose as vehicles for a convoluted memory-work. The varied selection of designs and frozen poses call into question the impact that sexuality and gendered stereotypes have on us as consumers. Ironically, the examples here are pulled from a sphere designated for the pre-sexual. Children's toys are given new potential in this suggestive and thought provoking show.
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Opening reception : Saturday July 8 2006, 3 to 5 pm Text: Lizz Dunlop Taking up where the founder of the Automatists left off nearly half a century ago, David Blatherwick's new investigations into the inter-relatedness of technological and biological semantics and form boast similarities in their aesthetic to the progressions witnessed in later works by Paul-Émile Borduas. One need only to compare paintings such as Borduas' Trees in the Night (1943) with The Return of Past Imprisoned Signs (1953) alongside Blatherwick's OTYFN series to see that the explorations of both artists have resounding similarities in the discovered aesthetic vocabulary while exploring non-figurative or non-representational realms. Transitioning from earlier focuses on lingual and metaphoric relationships, Blatherwick has zoned in on a particular overlap of shared language that comments on the interrelated infestation of both the biological and technological worlds of an insect-related variety (don't worry- no bug repellent required). Departing from the organic forms of bugs and worms- both visible and microscopic varieties- the artist attempts to demonstrate the interrelated nature of these infestations and, consequently, of the worlds in which they exist. The fluidity and sectioned aspects of the composition can be read as what the artist interprets as the inevitable interceptions of a given aspect of two seemingly separate facets of contemporary human experience. What carries forth is an understanding of technology and biology being intimately connected. There is an overriding organic balance to the works, that intentionally bear no resemblance to any model found in nature and yet they are understood as being distinctly organic. There is a visceral quality in the forms that recalls intestines, organs, as well as long past biology lessons. The viral implications of the connections, as seen in pieces like Parasite 2 (2005) make formal connections between the artist's intended focus and perhaps hint at attitudes towards the nature of human reproduction. Between these images and neighbouring works by artist, Yana Kerhlein, the exposition boasts a metropolitan feel that begs the visitor to intermittently examine the micro- and macrocosmic within each piece, oeuvre, and subject. The induced ebb and flow is not to be missed.
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Opening reception : Saturday July 8 2006, 3 to 5 pm Text: Andria Hickey Using his own photographs and "found" images from websites like NASA and googlemaps(TM), emerging artist Yana Kehrlein explores our contemporary visual understanding of geography. With the advent of the Internet, our access to hundreds of satellite surveillance images has allowed a new visual dimension of neighbourhoods, cities, countries to enter into our collective imaginary. While these photographs grant new understandings of contemporary space, as images they hold limited references of borders, housing developments, agriculture, water, and potentially deny the social, economic and political processes by which our geographies are mapped, manipulated and utilized. Playing with microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, Kehrlein revisions representations of seemingly neutral cartographies. A centrifugal element of the exhibition, Maquette, translates this process of revisioning contemporary cartography to the sculptural field. Like a postmodern arubix cube, Kehrlein's geographic matrix invites the viewer to reconstruct a personal understanding of the social and physical organization of urban space. Each suspended cube becomes not only a piece of a final image, but also represents the balance between the fragmentation and networking of the social and the individual. As a photography student at Concordia, Kehrlein's early works focused on the process of understanding space by "zooming in" and "zooming out" to reveal abstract narratives of detail in contrast with the image as whole. In the two dimensional works exhibited at Art Mûr, Kehrlein continues this process investigating current sites that are no longer neutral but heavy with history and event. Kehrlein's cartographic interventions include the expansion of the Siberian frontier, the mapping of opium exploitation in Afghanistan, a demographic chart of global population growth, suburban middle America, and the fraught residue of historic trauma in Germany. In one image, Kehrlein has digitally removed all representations from a satellite image of the frontier between the United States and Mexico except the images of water and irrigation systems. The cartography is changed, the border is no longer obvious. In an utopic effort to visualize a map of change, the remaining abstraction privileges what is similar and works to deny the imposition of geopolitical narratives of power. While Kehrlein digitally alters his images by removing items, magnification continues to play a significant role in the aesthetics of the final image. An interplay of micro and macro conceptually mirrors the medium so that pixilation becomes itself a similar system of cartography. Printed on linen and abstracted to simple elements of design, Kehrlein's images become sublime delicate traces of landmasses, histories, and human impact.
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Opening reception : Saturday May 20, 2006, 3 to 5 pm "We reference everything from the body." -Shayne Dark. If this is true, then works by Dark in this show must have a striking effect on many. Echoing the vibrancy of Pop Art and the scale of Minimalist sculpture, the work of Shayne Dark in Here and Gone, is punchy, crisp, and is full of compromises. Looking around the gallery, it is easy to see patterns in the forms, materials, and treatment of the work. For example, On Fire and Blizzard share similarities in all three of these areas. It is in the hue and presentation, that the artist creates radically different effects. Playing with fixed and dependent variables helps Dark to open the viewer up to one of his main interests, the plurality of perception. Emphasizing the details of the surface, how the interrelation of individual parts, and the overall feeling of the work, is therefore key. In traditional, Canadian art history, the use of trees has been strongly linked with the representation of individuals (Think: Thompson's Jack Pine ). Dark's choice to tint the unrefined wood in his works with intense primary colours, black and white, is a physical appeal that invites and includes the perceptions and interpretations of all the viewers to the gallery. The use of primary colours and shades relates to their status as the basis for producing all shades- their primacy. It is through the primitive, basic, senses that Dark's work initially connects with the viewer. Very much interested by hue and scale, Dark draws on these formal qualities for their particular ability to elicit an emotional response from the viewer. Seeking to create a direct connection with the viewer then allows for the further layering of multiple readings of the work, a part of each individual experience. The overall exhibit incorporates both tension and balance, in the combinations of material and in the structure. In the structures, Dark has used natural and imposed forces- often in competition with one another. Whereas in the materials, there is a combination of natural and manufactured materials, most notably the various wood vs. refined metals. There is a duality at play, that between the natural and the urban. It seems that in this age of post-Industrial Revolution, where we are plagued with the problems that surround finding a balance between these two worlds, Dark has found some common ground in the organic aspects of each, uniting the two in his oeuvre. Text: Lizz Dunlop |
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"It is as if this art wanted the gaze to shine, the object to stand, the real to exist, in all the glory (or the horror) of its pulsatile desire, or at least to evoke this sublime condition" Hal Foster, The Return of the Real While Nicolas Grenier's portraits, are at first glance, seductive paintings of images you might find in a Larry Clark inspired fashion feature, there is much more at stake in the cinematic blossomings of these figurative works. Grenier is fundamentally interested in the construction of popular images, how notions of style and beauty are worked into being and then sold, consumed and accepted as authentic. Using strategies of Superrealism, Grenier's portraits exploit a photographic vocabulary of illusion while simultaneously denying the reproductive possibilities of the photographic image. Grenier is not simply interested in deconstructing the commodified visual representation of the body as young and seductive. Rather, his portraits renegotiate the authenticity of his own media influenced youth culture. Each of Grenier's portraits is filtered through the same technology used in the advertisements he sees as mirrors for his peers. Grenier takes on the role of director, setting a stage for his models, who are also his friends, for impromptu, nightlong photo-shoots. He takes hundreds of photos, looking for images that might be able to conjure up an aura lost in the overwhelming simulacrum of the contemporary visual landscape. Grenier transforms his photographs into digital images to generate the ink-jet print he reproduces using a projection of the image on the canvas. The result is cinematic, super saturated hues, figures staged in an uncanny light. They appear real and illusory, often giving the impression of a film still. The cropping of the images suggests a character framed in a scene, amplifying a cinematic effect most evident in his series of large-scale portraits, L'étrangeté du réel, exhibited at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville in 2005. Here, his large-scale portraits, dimly lit against a black backdrop, hung like film projections mediating the empty space of the auditorium with the disconcerting gaze of the stylishly disenchanted. In Portraits, Grenier continues to explore the relationship between the contemporary visual environment and the figurative representation of youth. Like many other contemporary artists, Grenier's representation of youth is an idea suffused with the ideologies of society at large. At 24, Grenier is himself aware of the possibilities of being both a mirror for society and a reflection projected in the visual culture of the everyday. His cinematic portraits simultaneously investigate the charged space between photography and painting, popular culture and the avant-garde in an effort to re-appropriate the simulated image in his own reconstruction of the real. Both subject and object, the gaze of his figures confrontationally challenge the viewer to respond to their presence, making it impossible to simply pass by as if it were just another glossy spread. Text: Andria Hickey
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still life Henri Venne Room 1 Opening reception : Saturday April 8, 2006, 3 to 5 pm On the surface of these enamelled paintings, our body finds itself disquieted by its own reflection. The works stare back at us, echoing our presence; what we are seeing is looking back at us. Standing in front of the paintings we first encounter this illusory plastic plenitude of monochrome. It is then replaced with a vertiginous sensation of space delineated by the pigmented surfaces. We are engaged in a destabilizing experience despite the apparent calmness of the images, simultaneously contemplative and active, gazing over the minimalist and ethereal landscapes and modifying the ghost of our own presence. If colour remains an enigma, then Venne's painting becomes the embodiment of that enigma with each horizon line situating our contemplative gaze. Taking landscape samples from photography, Henri Venne's work is both an exploration of memory and a recollection of landscape. Even if the camera's eye possesses persuasive descriptive capacities, it can only partially memorize atmosphere; the abstract sensations of light and the poetic grounds of an environment are often lost in the photographic reproduction. By superimposing painting and photography in his series enfermements colorés (coloured containments), Venne makes a powerful evocation of the primordial through his use of light and the absence of figuration. These images of time collect and are interwoven into a visual chiasmus. This accumulation is present sometimes on the aluminium panels, other times, under the pictorial layers, on the paper used for the numeric printing and under the enamel of the surface. The found photographic images and the reverberations inscribed on the lacquered skin of the paintings weave together the affective memory of the places evoked into the frame of the viewer. Anchored in his present ponderings and exiled into lengthy contemplation, the work of Henri Venne results in a complex conception of painting which examines the physicality of each work, where surfaces, seemingly empty of figurative traces, evoke the infinite possibility of a poetic treatment of colours. Thus, in front of the evanescent quality of the images, the viewer hesitates between a contemplation of the coloured nothingness and the destabilization of an abstract and elusive image. Opening a dialogue between the idea of representation and the sensorial possibilities characteristic of formalist painting, Venne orchestrates a referential universe. It is as if the pigment and texture he uses is able to simulate a sort of archaeology of memory where we, as viewers before this reflective monochrome, also become inventors of meaning.
Text: Marie-Ève Beaupré |
Henri Venne |
An Ordinary Euphoria The recent works of Renée Duval renew a recurrent theme in art history: the landscape. The artist reveals, with photographic precision, the details of landscapes in their simplest expression. Branches, buds, leaves and other organic elements constitute the iconography of her pictorial compositions of trees. Using specific angles, Duval puts in perspective the importance of daily landscape. Despite the simplicity of her subject matter, Duval's past creations cannot be reduced to representation. Rather, it is a critique of representation that forms the conducting thread of her artistic process. In the series Taximonie (1990-96), Duval experimented with the representation of stuffed animals to interrogate romanticism and science. In 1997, Duval moved toward an investigation of the impact of cultural codes on the perception of national environments with the series, Les autours. Since this time, the operating mode of landscapes, sometimes romantic, sometimes inspirational, has been the focus of Duval's work. An ordinary euphoria continues to examine perspective in the contemplation of landscape. Using samples of organic material, the artist's latest paintings question the contemplative observer in order to examine the specificities of representing natural sites. The simple image of a tree before a sky emphasises Duval's attention to aesthetic qualities, which in turn allows for the possibility of a visual transcendence of emotional states. The artist observes, through her work, the narrative potential of diverse places and the emotions they elicit. Duval's use of colour creates an affecting tone, allowing the viewer to observe paintings imbedded with melancholy, dynamism and quietude. The relationship between the perception of the viewer and the content of the work is, in fact, a principal concern for Duval. The presentation of a place, its atmosphere and its impact on the spectator become the veritable subject matter of the paintings regrouped here by Art Mûr. Without referring to urban, rural, contemporary or ancient realms susceptible of attributing a narrative context to the landscapes, these paintings offer the viewer no possibility of identifying with anything other than that of the viewers own memory or personal frame of reference. The spaces are void of human connotations, presenting a new variety of distinct colours and motifs. The viewer's feelings become simultaneously oriented in the past, present and imaginative possibility for endless sensory and visual interpretations. Duval's artistic process not only evaluates the evocative power of the natural environment and the visual experience that it creates, but also resonates with the logic of postmodernist micro narratives. Duval's paintings foster the subjectivity of a personal experience rather than a universal narrative. Each work recovers an individual character where the subjectivity of perception exists in both production and observation. Duval reminds us that one's own viewing experience is symptomatic of personal life experiences and our subsequent potential for emotional investment in the natural environments she suggests will ultimately be unique. Text: Mélanie Rainville
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Contrast, hybridity, métissage: the pictorial universe constructed by Annie Hémond-Hotte can be understood through a logic of opposites. The recent production of the young artist reveals and intensifies this plastic vocabulary and her first experimentations emerge by assimilating, in a more personal manner, the formal language borrowed from children's drawings. Also in that logic of opposites, the paintings from the series Les ARCS are knowingly letting cohabit the realms of clumsy and feverish drawing lines with that of controllably applied coloured patches, thereby playing on semantic and visual tensions and creating a contemporary approach to abstract painting. It is through the architectural metaphor of the cathedral that Hémond-Hotte explores in this series the very idea of abstraction. After all, does the cathedral not represent the materialization of an immaterial concept? Retaining from this architectural and art history paradigm its most abstract and symbolically charged form - the arch - the artist questions the visual potential of the motif: the arch as an opening, essentially, but also the ascending dynamic of the crossing diagonal ribs (ogives) pointing upwards. The quest around this curved figure can be found in the works in the multiple layering and overlapping of the arches that, in their repetition, are shaping a passageway for the eye to enter. But, following the imagery of contrast and opposites found in the work of Annie Hémond-Hotte, the forms suggest as much the idea of an upward push as the idea of taking roots, in which the eye can seek the depth of the paintings. The arched form provides diverse connotations and is also a subject of fascination for many contemporary artists, notably with the British Andy Goldsworthy, who explores the arch's theme in his land art practice. Lastly, the theme investigated by this Montreal artist gives way to a questioning of temporality. As the paintings reveal the successive layers of paint and varnish and the proliferation of motifs, like mosaic fragments, they accumulate in a gestual construction marked by the passage of time. The production presented here stays away from the more brutal forms and expressive drawing in order to give the paintings a meditative dimension through a grave and fascinating chromatic presence. Graduated from Concordia University in 2004, the young artist has already forged her personal plastic language that one can recognize from one exhibition to another. For her third passage at the Art Mûr gallery, she proposes a contemporary outlook on a religious symbol in which she reveals its abstract valency. Text: Katrie Chagnon |
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Temporary Constellations Faithful to his preoccupations, Dennis Ekstedt presents here a corpus where one can recognize his singular pictorial aesthetics through details of urban and nocturnal landscapes. Again, he reveals a current problematic which enters his production into a coherent artistic ensemble; that of the fragmentation of the human being's perception. A consciously joyful awareness impregnates his work and dissuades the onlooker to believe the pieces to be simplistic and formal representations of the specificities of painting. The paintings put together for the exhibition "Temporary Constellation" present shapes of light colours and are assembled into a conglomeration of varied sizes that detach themselves from the obscure background. A cliché image of the city is evoked as a constant found within all of the paintings, and embodies it as the central subject. "Drift, Constellations" and other paintings have a power of evocation which contributes to the discursive role of his work. Legitimizing the diverse representations of the city, the medium chosen makes the pictorial compositions oscillate between an abstract representation and the figuration of urban and nocturnal landscapes. The paintings resist any form of classification and maintain an equivocal character, leaving the onlooker to his considerations. The urban world of Dennis Ekstedt incarnates a metaphor for the perception, in the sense that the city, synonym with rapidity and the fragmentation of the ephemeral, shares common grounds with that of perception. Light is used to evoke the human presence found in the city; the universal is shown in order to aim at the particular. By using bird's eye view perspectives, the artist reminds that separately, individuals have an incomplete perception of what surrounds them, often shallow and too fragmented, not taking into account the inevitable ensemble that is attached to the object of their observation. Ekstedt has stripped all figurative elements away from his current paintings, thereby removing himself from the narration that he proposed in his previous series, notably "Dérive", which was presented at the Art Mûr gallery in 2004. From this point on, no indication is given to the observer as a way to attribute a context to the scene that he is observing, and nothing indicates the nature of the standpoint from which he is observing. The two years separating the current exhibition and " Dérive" have conferred the urban representations an aerial dimension, as if one was observing from an up above point. The veil that seems to cover each landscape could be attributed to the thickness of an airplane window, sometimes letting the observer perceive what is behind through a reflection. Furthermore, the ethereal aspect is symbolised by the presence of bubbles in the foreground of certain pieces. The absence of a concrete figurative element does not, in the end, represent an obstacle to interpretation or narration. The image of the city is so strongly evoked that the pieces become dynamic and reveal an eloquent poetry. Simple but singular, the art of Dennis Ekstedt is timeless. Text: Mélanie Rainville Tanslation: Marie-Ève Deleris |
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Submerged under numerous layers of transparent acrylic gel, Katharine Harvey's paint brush strokes elude the eye who is attempting to identify them on the surface. Simultaneously conceptual and poetic, her purified representations depict a corpus of marine landscapes in plunging and low-angled views. The corpus of this Toronto artist is the result of a complex conception of painting which experiments with the materiality of the work, whose apparently limpid surface evokes the infinite possibilities of the perception of matter in movement. As if the surfaces' memory lost track of colour in the accumulation of its layers, the light is unable to make the aqueous bed's motifs appear. Reminding of the effect of a body's immersion into water, the gaze is plunged into the illusory depth of the work. Following a session of under-water photography, the artist attempted to reproduce the effects caught on film. If her paintings first appear free of narrative, it is in the how-to of painting that the narration occurs. The artist has to calculate the chronology of her layers, and to architecturally conceive of her compositions: more than fifty layers of transparent acrylic gel are applied. On each of these layers, a few lines will be drawn as to evoke the flickering of light reverberating into water. The experiencing of the paintings, of which the sides exceed the frame, is a tactile one. Putting the emphasis on materiality, her pictorial practice lays within the tension between the emptiness suggested in the water surface's movement and the images that the different brushstrokes can create. In this way the discourse generated is blurred between the contemplation of a natural phenomenon and the destabilisation of the abstract image, nevertheless so concrete. The Art Mûr gallery space is displaying here a series of acrylic on panels where the metaphysical potential of a physical phenomenon is explored via the interplay of the visible and invisible. After obtaining her master of fine arts at the University of Victoria, Katharina Harvey did a residency at Pouch Cove, St-John's, Newfoundland (1999) as well as at the Banff Centre (2003). Throughout the last few years, she exposed at the Durham Art Gallery (2004), at the Cambridge Galleries (2004) and participated at the 22 nd international symposium of contemporary art of Baie-St-Paul (2004). Text: Marie-Ève Beaupré
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Depuis ses bosquets d'espionnage factices, BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère et Nicolas Laverdière) épie les petites et grandes défaillances sociétales dans le but de déjouer les fondations symboliques d'un bonheur contemporain, celui ancré dans un matérialisme nord-américain. Formé à l'École des arts visuels de l'Université Laval en 1996, le collectif construit depuis des objets allégoriques tributaires d'une réflexion profonde sur nos comportements consommatoires et leurs répercussions. La loupe des sculpteurs, une lunette lucide et ludique, travestit les emblèmes de puissance et les symboles de confort de notre société afin de célébrer leur dérision au moyen d'une production sculpturale et installative. Lorsque présentés sur des sites extérieurs, les objets simulacres peuvent être introduits tels des erreurs dans un paysage (La cueillette, Centre Est-Nord-Est, 1999). D'autres fois, c'est un parcours qui sera élaboré afin d'accuser les bavures qui stigmatisent le lieu (La source, Grand-Métis, 2004). Récemment, leur pratique du défilé performatif visant à déstabiliser le marcheur urbain s'est ajoutée à la liste de leurs détournements provoquant sourires et malaises. À la suite d'une prolifique décennie de création, les expositions individuelles, résidences d'artistes et participations à d'importants événements en art actuel se sont multipliées. Les oeuvres de BGL ont notamment été présentées au Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (À l'abri des arbres, 2001), au Musée d'art moderne de Lille (Le ludique, 2003), au Centre d'art contemporain Bunkier Sztuki de Cracovie (Villes anciennes/Art nouveau, 2004) ainsi qu'à la Manif d'art de Québec (2005). Le temps d'une exposition, une première en terrain privé, les cimaises de la galerie prendront les allures des muretins d'un carré de sable que le collectif investira. Parmi les trophées ambigus que BGL souhaite exposer, notons Jouet d'adulte (2003), un véhicule tout-terrain fléché lors d'une saison de chasse, Venise (2004), un orignal naturalisé, Rapide et dangereux (2005), une flamboyante moto sport greffée au niveau de la roue avant ainsi que quelques autres stratagèmes où le prédateur se voit transformé en victime. Dans une enfilade d'expériences impliquant le corps, leurs assemblages métaphoriques dénoncent les impostures voilées sous des attitudes quotidiennes. Alors que leur esthétique de présentation souligne une visée mercantile, leur habileté à investir et déjouer les lieux qui l'accueille nous laisse entrevoir d'ingénieuses satires. L'on peut deviner que BGL saura se jouer du commercial et le célébrer à la fois. Texte: Marie-Ève Beaupré Read press reviews for this exhibition
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Avec l'exposition time after time, Lois Andison nous présente deux œuvres issues d'une production récente. Représentée par la galerie Art Mûr, ses œuvres ont été montrées dans plusieurs villes du Canada, des États-Unis et du Mexique. Une série de photographies cadrant un même lieu et prises quotidiennement chaque demi-heure des journées de l'année 2004 composent la vidéo Timelapse 04'. D'une fenêtre, on y voit la cour arrière d'une maison de même que le décor environnant. Ce qui pourrait alors relever de l'anodin prend soudainement une autre dimension. Chaque moment capté fait voir une transition parfois subtile, autrefois notoire, incitant le visiteur à être attentif afin d'en saisir les mutations progressives. Les couleurs, les formes, les lignes disparaissent pour en faire apparaître d'autres, laissant place à une composition sans cesse renouvelée. De ce fait, elle provoque une perpétuelle redéfinition des caractéristiques propres à chaque élément, vivant ou inerte, figurant dans l'espace. Mise en valeur par la variation de la lumière naturelle, par un changement de saison ou encore par la démolition puis la reconstruction d'un bâtiment, chaque composante acquiert une nouvelle identité malgré le fait qu'elle soit perçue à partir d'un seul et même point de vue; l'observation de telles métamorphoses nous incite à considérer autrement nos perceptions vis-à-vis le temps et l'espace. C'est l'intervention de la caméra qui concède à la manifestation d'un moment qui ne pourrait être reproduit, permettant ainsi une tentative de négociation avec ce qui nous glisse des mains : le temps s'écoulant en dépit de notre volonté. À travers le déroulement de la bande vidéo, le temps passe donc, mais nous est définitivement rendu apparent par le défilement d'images qui, elles, ont été fixées à l'intérieur d'instants qui ne sont plus. Par l'emploi de différentes technologies, l'artiste torontoise met en évidence une volonté de prise par l'humain sur ce qui lui échappe. Celles-ci servent alors d'instruments ayant le potentiel d'assouvir cette insuffisance en améliorant et en rectifiant les composantes nécessaires à l'achèvement de diverses aspirations. Toute une collection de sculptures robotisées constitue également le travail de Lois Andison. Si elles font parfois confronter des qualités qui nous semblent à première vue antagoniques (par exemple, la relation s'établissant entre le naturel et l'artificiel, l'organique et le mécanique, etc.), d'autres illustrent assurément des attitudes et comportements humains. Teintée d'humour et de lucidité, la pièce Top Dog témoigne de l'effort soutenu qui se manifeste souvent entre deux parties afin d'accéder à un statut privilégié et ce, sans que jamais l'une d'elles y parvienne de façon permanente. Texte: Édith Roy |
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No Second Thought Pour une première fois à Montréal, Orest Tataryn présente des installations faites de lumière qui invitent à la contemplation. Depuis la fin des interventions urbaines du collectif Skunkworks/Outlaw Neon (1991-1999) dont il était membre fondateur, l'artiste torontois sculpte la lumière en solo. La lumière, médium artistique rarissime, fascine par sa présence et la manière dont sa forme vaporeuse emplit l'espace. Tataryn s'intéresse à ces singuliers effets sculpturaux ainsi qu'à la capacité du médium à créer illusions optiques, rémanences et à altérer notre perception. On ressent la portée de ces différentes qualités du médium dans les œuvres de l'artiste créées, notamment, à partir d'événements sociaux ou politiques (tsunami), d'expériences personnelles (10 day bottle) et d'explorations formelles (série colour fields). Par exemple, dans l'œuvre 10 day bottle, c'est plutôt la relation physique entre la lumière et la couleur qui étonne. L'œuvre, inspirée d'une retraite méditative dont il a fait l'expérience, présente de petites bouteilles de compte-goutte à l'intérieur desquelles de petits éléments lumineux ont été insérés. La lumière des bouteilles, chacune représentant une journée de retraite, reflète la progression de son état psychique à chaque jour additionnel de repos, passant du vert au rouge. En contrepartie, dans une installation comme Yellow Waterfall, la lumière dorée des néons se disperse comme l'éther dans l'espace. Tel un spectre, un voile translucide tombe en cascade sur le sol diffusant la lumière des néons. Ainsi, par les différentes formes que l'artiste donne à ses œuvres, la lumière devient entité et objet de méditation.
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