In 1987, while planting trees in British Columbia, Gilbert began a seven-year photo project documenting the forestry industry from a tree planter’s point of view. Stylistically, she borrowed the panoramic aesthetic of early Wild West explorers and Ansel Adams’s fine art approach to the mountain wilderness, still pristine and untouched for the most part even in the early 20^th century. The body of work that arose from this experience, Shaping the New Forest, testifies to the far-ranging impact of Canada’s natural resource exploitation on the environment.

Twenty years later, Gilbert turned her camera on the landscape of Quebec and found it reshaped by economic parameters. The fallout from free-trade deals and the impact of globalization have led to a surfeit of local and collective cultural disasters the world over: the death of family farms and the small towns upon which they depend; the loss of jobs with the depletion of primary resources; the exodus of rural populations to the cities. Global economics has shifted wealth dramatically, leaving much of North America in a state of decline. And Quebec is no exception. Le Patrimoine depicts a cultural landscape slowly transformed in the collision of environmental and economic imperatives. Moving from the rural to the urban, and reflecting this collision at a macro scale, The Messengers takes us to the sites of graffiti artistes, to look not at their already ubiquitous work, but at the detritus that they leave behind. The photographs are aesthetic reconstructions of the ground from wich they work, their studio floor, while they exercise their own form of political art-making and reclaiming of public space.

Gilbert’s latest work, a diptych titled Once (Upon) a Forest, takes a radically different approach to the landscape. Here the high-res, plastic quality of the scanning process reveals the complexity and plenitude of a mixed deciduous boreal forest over the length of a growing season. Parallel views show how, in less than 200 years, such forests have been transformed into treeless, weedy vacant lots on the outskirts of countless cities, like this one teeming with weeds and flowers just west of downtown Ottawa.

This exhibition presents photographs taken over the 25-year period from 1988 to 2013.

Presentation on Saturday, September 14, 2013 at 2 p.m.
Opening \ Launch on Saturday, September 14, at 3pm

For many years now, Michel Lamothe has made the notion of landscape the core focus of his photography. This retrospective exhibition attempts to shed light on the different forms of exploration, and the consistent aspects, of what is far more than a simple theme. By titling two of his series with the word paysage (landscape), Lamothe has underscored this aspect of his practice. For beyond the frequent presence of easily recognizable elements typical of the genre – whether in nature (mountain, tree, waterway, cloud, etc.) or in urban life (street, building, park, etc.) – his work questions multiple issues related to this type of imagery. The various series he has developed over the years seem to play, each in its own way, with the ambiguity inherent in the images, but also with our ability to truly see the world around us. The exhibition also includes works dealing with the human landscape, a subgenre of contemporary photography that represents the body in pictures to be read as actual landscapes. Overall, it suggests ways to follow the development not of a concerted theory of landscape but, rather, of what Michel Collot* calls a pensée-paysage (thought landscape).

Bernard Landriault and Michel Paradis have been collecting contemporary Quebec art for more than 25 years and presently own close to 200 works. At first glance, their collection appears eclectic, with no one medium, artist, theme or movement predominating. This is not surprising, since it began with diverse pieces that caught their fancy at exhibitions. But the works that attract them often share a peculiar feature, an invisible bond of kinship. Landriault and Paradis do not collect objects of art as such. Most of the time their choices are based less on the material properties of a work than on the methods used to create it; in other words, they involve the material-method relationship and the discrepancy, or gap, between the making process devised by the artist and the work’s final appearance. The emphasis on process emerged with Post-Minimal Art and Process Art more than 40 years ago, but the (then modern) concept was based on the premise of transparency: the production steps and strategies had to be plainly and clearly legible in the completed object or drawing. Conversely, Landriault and Paradis are drawn to works that cunningly obscure the ways and means of their making. As a result, exhibiting part of their collection represents an attempt – and a challenge – to demonstrate the practice of two collectors who collect both practices and works of art.

Jean-Pierre Gauthier’s art initially revolved around references to the workaday world and allusions to mental disorder. But he has always felt it important to highlight the discrepancies between the object used, the function that activates it and the sound that it has the potential to make. It has been nearly twenty years since the exhibition Les machines proliférantes (1995), which consolidated the artist’s thinking on the process of metamorphosis and the alteration of ordinary objects, and during that time he has kept eye and ear alert.

Looking back at his approach, it is interesting to note the abstract nature of the interactivity between artwork and viewer, the gradual disappearance of narrativity and the increasing refinement of the assembly process. If his recent projects mark a return to the essence of acoustic effects, it is because his interest in sound h