Stéphan Bernier, a young artist from the Lac Saint-Jean region, stands out for his interdisciplinary art and versatile skills. Inquiring into collective unconsciousness and abuse, he articulates his views by playing on associations. Consistent with this approach, Rêves humides takes a critical and subversive look at the symbolic bases of contemporary happiness. The works probe the borders erected by Western culture between dream, reality and fiction, proceeding by what the artist calls semantic travesties. By contaminating the iconography of the affect-charged objects that make up his installations, sculptural pieces and videos, he projects his most intimate desires into them. The exhibition includes recent and previously unseen works characterized by a quest for identity and bearing comic-erotic titles that orient the viewer's perception while leaving the door open to multiple interpretations.

Opening and performance by the artist on July 28, 2007 at 3 p.m.
Presentation by Stéphan Bernier on August 8 at 7 p.m.

Founded in 1997, Perte de Signal is a collective dedicated to the production, research and development of artistic projects involving new media. It promotes “emerging” and widely differing practices that help to recontextualize the aesthetic proposition of the media arts in Quebec. Taking varied forms, the projects seek to rethink the presentation methods for digital artworks through a critical analysis of the interfaces of the computer as creative tool. For the show at EXPRESSION, members of the collective propose to illustrate their thinking within their artwork’s space through the movement, or displacement, of image, sound and object as materials of creation.

[French only]
Originaire de Santiago au Chili, Rafael Sottolichio explore les diverses modalités d'expression de la peinture à partir de clichés photographiques, qui s'imbriquent alors au processus créatif. Poursuivant une constante réflexion sur la fabrication des images, ses œuvres exploitent le potentiel narratif des rapports de tension s'instaurant entre figuration et espace structuré. Pour ce faire, l'artiste met en scène des personnages dans des environnements réels ou entièrement imaginaires. De facture réaliste ou simplement évoqués par une silhouette, ces personnages créent des situations d'étrangeté par leur attitude envers l'environnement dans lequel ils sont inscrits. La manière de peindre participe alors à la construction d'une dialectique, où la narrativité permet d'infirmer ou de confirmer le rapport de tension existant entre l'humain et son environnement. L'exposition présentée à EXPRESSION propose un survol de la production de la dernière décennie, à partir de la mise en abyme des différentes syntaxes de son contenu photographique.

Montreal conceptual artist Michael A. Robinson has developed an emotion-charged body of work that transgresses dominant notions of art and artistic genre. His works directly and literally question the nature of creative expression and the condition of the artist. Mixing figurative and formal languages, conceptual and expressionist conventions, he follows an approach in which the works deliberately play on the candid vulnerability of the acts inherent to making art. Featuring drawings, installations and sculptures, L’horizon des événements is built around the precise moment when a work of art takes shape in the artist’s mind. Individually devoid of meaning, the pieces present themselves in a movement of implosion, inviting the viewer to share the experience that gave rise to their creation.

Lévis-born Richard Baillargeon, an anthropologist by training, has been working for close to two decades on a photographic oeuvre in which the incorporation of words on the paper support weaves a framework that opens onto multiple poetic interpretations. The exhibition Les Marques de l'exsangue, curated by Lisanne Nadeau, comprises some thirty images laid out in the form of polyptychs. It is an exploration of the narrative virtualities of the still picture, based on heterogeneous materials. Composed mainly of visual documents such as fragments of old post cards, illustrations and photos from an anonymous family album, the polyptychs serve to explore the tangled paths of meaning and feeling. While drawing the viewer into a story where reality and fiction intertwine, Baillargeon's intent is ceaselessly deported towards a metaphoric space where landmarks shift and the known becomes a blur.

Montreal artist Johanne Gagnon has devoted many years to a singular project aimed at establishing the archaeological profile of her ideal home. The project is an allegory for art-making, conceived as a reflection on the status of the artist and the uniqueness of the creative process, with no realization intended. In pursuing this artistic approach, Gagnon has shown that construction is not essential to accomplishment. Over more than a dozen years, she exhibited the various steps that go into creating a house: sketches, plans, interior arrangements, sculpture-installations, studies for indoor-outdoor openings and decorative choices, all serving to question the construction of form. This exhibition focuses on moments in the artist’s studio presented in chronological order and through them reveals a long succession of staged representations of the construction process. The Johanne Gagnon exhibition Moments d’atelier, 1990-2003, will be accompanied by a catalogue co published by EXPRESSION and Plein sud.