As honorary presidents of ORANGE 2015, we are pleased to be associated with a contemporary art event that, by highlighting the relationships between the food industry and art, has been able to develop an approach that mirrors its local community. Through the eyes of contemporary artists from here and abroad, ORANGE offers the public a fresh look at a sector that is the economic motor of the Saint-Hyacinthe region.
This somewhat improbable encounter between the art milieu and the food industry makes ORANGE a unique event, reminding us of the many and varied benefits in art/business partnerships. All over the world, numerous examples prove the benefits of a greater sharing of public spaces with artists, both to the artists themselves and to a surrounding economy energized in the process. In beautifying our living environment, art makes our cities more attractive, revitalizing neighborhoods and encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.
Throughout the coming years, we hope for the continued development of the already budding relationship between the cultural sector and the business world. It is important that, above and beyond cultural patronage, those from business invest more time and resources in cultural undertakings. Their networks and expertise can make a real difference in this sector that, despite its precarious situation, plays a key role as lever in terms of social and economic development.
It is in this spirit that we invite you to discover the numerous activities associated with ORANGE, LES VISCÉRAUX, which takes place from September 12 to October 25, 2015 in Saint-Hyacinthe, and also in the Kamouraska region, to where this 5th edition has been expanded.
We wish to thank participating artists for their participation and uncompromising commitment.
We also wish to thank the curators, co-directors, and all those who have contributed, directly or indirectly, to making this 5th edition of ORANGE a success.
Benoit Chartier et Alexandre Taillefer
Honorary presidents of ORANGE 2015
The triennial exhibition ORANGE, instigated in our beautiful region, often described as the breadbasket of Québec, is a laboratory of reflection inhabited by artists dealing with the relationships between contemporary art and the food industry. For the 5th edition, the curators, Céline Mayrand (exhibition section) and Sylvie Tourangeau (performance art residency section), ask the question “is there a drive behind artmaking that stems from the same place as hunger and deprivation?” As with previous editions, ORANGE 2015 takes place in Saint-Hyacinthe’s downtown, and, for the first time, in three municipalities in the Kamouraska region, where, as in the Saint-Hyacinthe area, the food industry has a strong presence. ORANGE 2015 brings together the works of 28 artists from Québec, Canada and Japan, including eight artists working mainly in performance.
The works of 13 artists will be presented from September 12th to October 25th, 2015, in three sites in downtown Saint-Hyacinthe. The multidisciplinary artist Massimo Guerrera will occupy the entirety of EXPRESSION’s exhibition space with a laboratory-artwork intended to guide the public through a sort of initiatory voyage within the entrails of the event. On Rue des Cascades, just two blocks from the public market building that houses EXPRESSION, the ORANGE pavilion will host artists from Québec and Canada, while the works of three artists from Tokyo will be presented at the JAPANESE pavilion. An entire section of the event will be allotted to performance art, with 4 artists in residence that will explore the city and infiltrate into the everyday life of its inhabitants. ORANGE 2015 will also pay tribute to Joseph Beuys, visceral artist par excellence, through a celebration of the 50th anniversary of his classic performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. We have entrusted the updating and adaptation of this piece to stage director and actress Marie Brassard.
Organizing an event like ORANGE necessarily implies the collaboration of many dedicated partners. We firstly wish to thank the curators and participating artists for their trust and precious collaboration; they are ORANGE’s soul, lifeblood and raison d’être. We also wish to underscore the support from our main sponsors and partners, the city of Saint-Hyacinthe, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, and Canadian Heritage. In conclusion, we also wish to acknowledge the passionate collaboration of ORANGE’s two honorary presidents, Benoit Chartier and Alexandre Taillefer.
We wish to extend a warm welcome to all visitors to the regions of Saint-Hyacinthe and Kamouraska, and to this 5th edition of ORANGE.
Marcel Blouin et Véronique Grenier
Co-directors of ORANGE, Contemporary Art Event of Saint-Hyacinthe
Vrille|Art actuel is an organization based in La Pocatière that fosters the development of contemporary art practices within an interdisciplinary framework. We privilege the creation of new types of knowledge while giving a predominant role to artist residencies, innovative projects and new partnerships. We create encounters between contemporary art and varied publics, prioritizing targeted approaches to diffusion and education that utilize public space and sites not conventionally used for showing art.
It is with these strengths in mind that we had the ambitious idea of presenting a section of ORANGE in the Kamouraska region. During a meeting in La Pocatière with Marcel Blouin, director of EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, the affinities between our two regions, with their common ties to the food industry, rapidly became evident. The decision to collaborate was an easy one, but the actualization of the project was still ahead of us. Planning and organization of the 5th edition was already underway, so we had to act quickly, not wanting to jeopardize the possibility of a collaboration that might no longer be possible at a future date. The open-mindedness and encouragement of the ORANGE team towards our emerging centre was the impetus needed to overcome the various obstacles in our path.
And so ORANGE KAMOURASKA was born, thanks to the networking of several partnerships that have allowed the event to take root at several sites all across the Kamouraska region, both in the form of exhibitions and performances. We believe that it is imperative to heighten the visibility of contemporary art in rural regions and this first, highly visceral edition of ORANGE KAMOURASKA has allowed to clear a pathway that will serve as foundation for many editions to come.
We would like to thank the ORANGE team for their contribution, vision and objective of giving art and artists a decisive role in the evolution of our society, through critical reflection on the numerous issues we are faced with in our present-day world.
Éric Brouillette
General Director
Vrille|Art actuel
As the curators of ORANGE 2015, we initially approached this 5th edition of the event in a spirit of continuity with the 2012 edition, Les Mangeurs, which relinquished somewhat the theme of food in favour of an exploration of the beings that use it to nourish themselves.
We began by examining hunger itself, that uncomfortable sensation of emptiness that, if left unfulfilled, eventually leads all living beings to viscerally search for food. From early on in life, experiences structure our food-related behaviour. From the instinctual search for mother’s milk, through fishing and gathering all the way up to predation, the search for nourishment necessary to survival has always been foremost among our concerns as human beings. Like all survival drives, hunger cannot be controlled; it is felt, experienced and always finds a way to satiate itself.
Craving, appetite, need, desire and want; what might these words mean if applied to artmaking? Where does their voracity come from? Is there a creative drive stemming from the same place as hunger and deprivation? What realities “viscerally” strike a chord with the same level of intensity, in terms of our bodies, our inadequacies, our fears and our imaginations?
There is latent creativity in all types of work and labour. As humans using an open-form approach to organizing the social space, we are all artists. — Joseph Beuys.
Much as the farmer sows, cultivates and harvests, or raises livestock destined to nourish, artists also sow, cultivate, raise and sublimate feelings that nourish both the mind and the collective imagination.
Whereas the last edition of ORANGE, Les Mangeurs, focused on types of life-giving nourishment without which living beings perish, LES VISCÉRAUX examines the drives of hunger and creation, the innate and visceral motivations that inspire artists to nourish the imagination.
These viscéraux are born artists. Creatively engaged in a perpetual redefinition of the everyday, they create art out of life itself. The works of twenty-eight artists, including eight performance artists, will be presented in a context of reflection and exploration on the aesthetics of craving and the idea of viscerality. The performance artists will furthermore offer up their bodies and lifeblood, taking the risk of the chance encounter in an aesthetic sculpted out of raw, unhewn situational matter.
PERFORMANCE ART RESIDENCY SECTION Is it possible to reach out and touch essential and subtle aspects of the raw and the cooked, and to share them with others, in real-time? It is precisely this question that the performance artists, during residencies in Saint-Hyacinthe and Kamouraska, will attempt to answer. Working in individual, collective and collaborative modes, they will attempt to embody the full potential of the things that concurrently inhabit, differentiate and unite us.
This ad hoc community of performers, occupying the interstice between reality and art, will inscribe an active presence into the very fabric of the city. They will actualize an openness and movement towards the other, in a mode of performativity and necessity, through dialogical and relational approaches and using transactional objects, strategies of closeness, and spontaneous and individualized interventions. This mode of performativity is rooted in organic motivations and a precision of action and intention guided by the eloquence of the unforeseeable, the power of coming together, the rich potential of polarities, and the creation of new possibilities in regards to our human condition, direly in need of nourishment to stay alive.
In the performance art section of ORANGE 2015, the artistic approaches represented reflect not only the singular and complex relationships that we, as individuals, maintain with the materialities and immaterialities that satiate us, but also mirror our ways of dealing with the vital, paradoxical and ineluctable world of the food industry.
The food that we eat undergoes all sorts of genetic and alchemical modifications, much as we, as eaters, are also transformed by what we ingest and digest. The same is true for living artforms that give rise to processes of transformation between modes of resilience and resistance. We will present performative practices that are relational in the sense that they create situations in which we are confronted with the here and now, the event-based nature of daily life, and with the urgency to take action in society.
The 2015 edition of ORANGE will make manifest that which defines the mind and body in their capacity to speak to the drives to live, survive, resist and especially to create and maintain action, communication and relationships.
EXHIBITION SECTION The “visceral” is the unthought-of and the unthinkable, the unnamable, irrational and inexpressible. It is the absolute of flesh and the paradoxical voracity of giving and of giving oneself over to the outside world.
Avec tous ceux et celles qui nous habitent, a many-facetted exhibition/artwork by Massimo Guerrera, will occupy the entirety of EXPRESSION’s exhibition space. This multidisciplinary artist, whose field of experimentation revolves around orality, otherness, relationality and all brands of shared nourishment, has been invited to create an immersive laboratory-artwork that will guide the public through a sort of initiatory voyage within the entrails of ORANGE. The installation, which will evolve over the course of the event, will present various forms of expression and representation, including drawing, photography, painting and sculpture, and will be supplemented by several public performances. The space of the work, a site designed to encourage encounters, sharing and openness to the other, will also serve as a point of departure for visitors to ORANGE. Avec tous ceux et celles qui nous habitent transcends the compartmentalization of traditional disciplines to forge relationships between participating artists and their varied practices.
Whether it is intellectual, emotional, bodily or spiritual in nature, earthly food never seems to completely satiate our hunger. From the most primal actions originating in the gut, the impulses of instinctive, gesture-based modes of calligraphy and Tachism, to more complex, impenetrable and conceptual installations, by way of raw, excessive and Fauvist paintings and staged photography and video, all means are valid to the end of giving voice to those overflowing creative drives that represent an unembellished version of the world, speak to us, touch us, and that shake us to our core with their raw truthfulness. The hunger of the world is voracious… and art is visceral.
Céline Mayrand and Sylvie Tourangeau
Curators
Tous les trois ans, les artistes contemporains participant à ORANGE nous portent à réfléchir sur notre rapport à la nourriture et à l’agriculture. En tant que technopole agroalimentaire située au cœur de la région agricole la plus fertile du Québec, Saint-Hyacinthe est fière d’accueillir les artistes de Saint- Hyacinthe, du Québec, du Canada, des États-Unis et même d’autres pays qui se réuniront pour donner vie à l’événement. Sous le thème « LES VISCÉRAUX », cet événement prisé des amateurs d’art de partout au Québec s’intéresse cette année à la sensation de faim. Ce tiraillement qui nous pousse sans cesse à rechercher de la nourriture est la raison d’être du métier d’agriculteur. Le parcours d’ORANGE nous invite à redécouvrir notre ville et à revisiter le domaine de l’agroalimentaire sous une perspective surprenante, différente, intrigante ou même dérangeante. Je vous invite donc à venir en grand nombre admirer les œuvres des artistes. Je félicite les organisateurs pour leur engagement dans la réalisation de cet événement unique, et je souhaite bon succès à ORANGE.
Claude Corbeil
Maire de Saint-Hyacinthe
Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec est heureux de soutenir ORANGE, L’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe. Les visiteurs sont de plus en plus nombreux à fréquenter cette manifestation singulière pour y découvrir des pratiques artistiques novatrices. Des artistes d’ici et d’ailleurs y proposent des œuvres inédites qui questionnent nos habitudes de consommation et notre rapport à l’agriculture, un secteur d’activité important de la Montérégie que l’on surnomme le « garde-manger du Québec ». Nous avons la chance de vivre dans une société ouverte à toutes les formes d’expression. Cet espace de liberté, qui est cher au CALQ, prend admirablement place dans une manifestation comme ORANGE, permettant à l’art de faire avancer le monde et d’enrichir notre vie culturelle. Je vous souhaite à tous d’heureuses découvertes !
Stéphan La Roche
Président-directeur général
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
Je suis fière de contribuer au succès du 5e événement ORANGE et à son rayonnement. Cette année, on nous promet une foule d’événements alliant l’art actuel et l’agroalimentaire, avec des artistes qui prendront le temps de s’imprégner de l’âme de Saint-Hyacinthe afin de créer des performances inspirées de notre quotidien, de notre réalité. L’art est au cœur de notre communauté. Quand il s’expose, il témoigne de la vitalité des gens qui y vivent, qu’ils soient entrepreneurs, travailleurs ou artistes. Le dynamisme, l’innovation et la créativité des Maskoutains n’est plus à prouver. Au fil des ans, entrepreneurs, citoyens et artistes ont laissé leur empreinte sur la région, mais aussi à la grandeur du Québec. Et ça continue. Je vous souhaite de profiter pleinement de votre expérience à l’événement ORANGE. Bravo aux organisateurs, aux artistes et à tous ceux qui se sont impliqués.
Chantal Soucy
Députée de Saint-Hyacinthe
Assemblée nationale du Québec
Notre gouvernement sait à quel point les arts et la culture sont importants à l’épanouissement des Canadiens. C’est pourquoi nous sommes fiers d’appuyer des rencontres comme le 5e ORANGE, l’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe. Ce rendez-vous unique en son genre mise sur différents modes d’expression artistique pour susciter une réflexion sur la place qu’occupe la nourriture et l’agroalimentaire dans nos vies. Pour ce faire, il propose toute une gamme d’activités rendues possibles grâce à la participation d’artistes du Québec, du Canada et de l’étranger. Au nom du premier ministre Stephen Harper et du gouvernement du Canada, je salue les organisateurs, artistes et créateurs qui assurent la présentation de ce 5e ORANGE. Vos efforts en vue de mettre l’art actuel à la portée de tous sont dignes de mention.
L’honorable Shelly Glover
Ministre du patrimoine canadien
