2014-2015
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Réalité / Utopie
Over the past ten years, Karine Giboulo's artworks have been challenging the way our society works, taking a critical stance on various issues related to life in the first world: industrialization, capitalism, consumerism, hyper-consumerism, urbanization, globalization, worker exploitation, the growth of slums and megacities, and the ongoing isolation of the individual.The importance and scope of Giboulo's work justifies a retrospective exhibition at this point in her relatively young art career. Réalité / Utopie allows for an overview of her work's evolution in several mediums – drawing, dioramas, "life bubbles" – as well as her exploration of various socially and humanistically-oriented preoccupations. Both realistic and fanciful, these artworks abound with details. Giboulo stages figurines of people and animals made of polymer clay painted in bright colours within installations that evoke the world of childhood and draw the spectator in with their whimsical nature. However, the intention behind the work contrasts strongly with this playfulness, compelling the spectator to question and critique.
Continuing her reflection on habitats around the world, Giboulo took inspiration from a tower recently built in Shanghai (The Vertical City : Shanghai Tower) for the new work she has created for the exhibition, a futuristic and utopian architectural diorama. This tower, complete with a ground-floor level of boutiques, retirement home, parking lot and factories, rises up, cloud-like, to the stratosphere, dwelling-place of the elite.
Both weighty and accessible, realistic and utopian, poetic and rooted in the here and now, Réalité / Utopie invites us into a world that is playful in form, but whose content is resolutely demanding and critical.
Opening and guided tour on Saturday, September 13, 2014 at 2pm.
When the Shadows Change Colour / Quand les ombres changent de couleur
Chih-Chien Wang is interested in the makeup of personal identity. Notes taken during his wanderings, found objects presented as still lifes, as images of the self, the other, or of the urban environment are all elements of his work that demonstrate to what extent images set up and define who we are, and who we believe ourselves to be. The resulting constructions reveal the fragile nature of these representations of the self.
Photography and video – and their placement within installations – are the tools of choice with which Wang captures fleeting impressions and translates them into a nuanced and minimalist stage play.
The exhibition presented at EXPRESSION, When the Shadows Change Colour / Quand les ombres changent de couleur, addresses a strange phenomenon. What do we know of the people we run into in the street, in our everyday comings and goings? Chih-Chien Wang explores this singular relationship to the other, one that is based both on a lack of knowledge, and on the moment when a glimpse is caught. To these notes – a testament to fleeting epiphanies, those brief moments where the other seems to reveal himself – Wang adds video works, including a double projection that presents the results of a consensual intrusion into the personal spaces and routines of the users of Montreal's Parc La Fontaine.
Opening and guided tour on Saturday, November 8, 2014 at 2pm.
La révolte de l’imagination Une rétrospective
A coproduction of the Musée régional de Rimouski and EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication created in partnership between the two institutions.
The retrospective exhibition Mathieu Beauséjour, La révolte de l’imagination foregrounds an artistic approach where political, social, aesthetic and poetic concerns are closely interwoven. This career overview highlights Beauséjour's ever-evolving engagement towards anti-capitalist and anarchist values, as embodied in polysemous artworks that bring together conceptual inventiveness and and aesthetic attentiveness. Far from being subject to the demands of a fixed-meaning and utilitarian political stance, Beauséjour's works unite a romantic and revolutionary stance with a critical attitude towards artistic and political avant-gardes.
This overview of Mathieu Beauséjour's work between 1991 and 2014 showcases his solidly coherent interest in macropolitical issues, a recurrent theme in his aesthetic and formal trajectory, evolving at times in subtle shifts, other times in sharp turns. Beauséjour is an anachronistic figure in Québec contemporary art – where political involvement is more often than not manifest on the micropolitical level – tackling macropolitical questions with an approach where the spirit of revolt is carried forward by the imagination.
The revolt of the imagination is the expression of an attitude that is both revolutionary and romantic, exploring the real and our surpassing of it in favour of a utopian future. Citing Henri Lefebvre, we might say that it is a question of "a romantic sensibility – more important than an ideology – or perhaps an ideology lived out in a mode of sensibility."
The book launch for the retrospective publication Mathieu Beauséjour, La révolte de l’imagination will take place during the vernissage. The book includes essays by the curator, Andréanne Roy, and by Robin Simpson and Sonia Pelletier.
Opening and guided tour on Saturday, February 14, at 2pm.
SATELLITES
Jean-Pierre Aubé's artistic research, beginning in the late 1990s, initially focussed on the notion of landscape as considered within the "pagus", or the delimitation of a inhabited territory. In this perspective, the territory is limited by the boundary that brings it into being. However, Aubé's explorations would soon extend beyond what can be observed, according to our knowledge of the perceptible world.
Recording VLF waves (Very Low Frequency) gave birth to several projects, such as VLF Natural Radio (2000-2004) and the series Électrosmog (2009 - 2012). In orchestrating these radio frequencies, Aubé creates yet-unheard variations on our experience of landscape. Using the appropriate technologies, usually self-designed, he captures and makes manifest electromagnetic phenomena that are neither audible nor visible. Furthermore, taking inspiration from scientific methods, particularly from astrophysics, he extrapolates meaning from the landscape by transforming it into visual and sonic installations. Since the projects Titan et au-delà de l’infini (2007), 31 soleils (Dawn Chorus) (2010) and Exoplanètes (2011), Aubé has been using various scientific and technical data to create the tools necessary to produce his universe of sound and images, a universe whose genesis remains clouded in mystery.
For the exhibition presented at EXPRESSION, these visions of the universe are driven by an examination of our planet's current situation as a territory under high surveillance. The Électrosmog series raises political and economic issues related to the telecommunications sector, while alluding to other types of present-day threats as well. Indeed, with hordes of artificial satellites at the service of private interests orbiting our planet, the Earth has become a highly-controlled field of observation. However, in presenting this geo-political and technological occupation by way of artistic means (video, photo, sound installation), Aubé proposes a fictionalization of the real, with the goal of better understanding it.1.
Opening and guided tour on Saturday, May 23 at 2pm.
1. « Le réel doit être fictionné pour être pensé ». Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, Mayenne: La Fabrique éditions, 2006, p. 61.