2017-2018
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Room(s) to move : je, tu, elle
An exhibition in three segments presented, respectively, by EXPRESSION, the MacLaren Art Centre and the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, Room(s) to move : je, tu, elle represents an ideal opportunity to catch up on the work that Sophie Jodoin has been doing over the past seven years.
The body, initially very present in the artist’s imagery, has become a more discreet presence—but it is still there to varying degrees, depending on the movements of the visitor, who has become an integral part of the situations that Jodoin has constructed in these three segments. Each of these conveys a nuanced view of a woman’s reality in three sets of circumstances: domestic life, intimacy, the world of medical treatment.
Language, which became an increasingly greater component of the artist’s work, now informs her approach to the extent that it is the work’s prime means of articulation: her series, no longer exploring the ramifications of a single theme, have assumed the shape of assemblages to be read as if they were sentences. Each drawing, collage and object have become fragments of an open narrative, one that changes in accordance with their positions in space.
Room(s) to move : tu, which is the first segment of the artist’s project, explores the public image of a particular woman, with forays into other issues such as social roles and norms, education, prescriptions and the definitions to which women are expected to conform.
Guided Tour and vernissage, on Saturday, August 26, 2017 at 2 pm
Nous sommes tous des brigands / We are all robbers
Since the early 2000s, Karen Tam has been studying the aesthetics of the spaces inhabited by a westernized Chinese culture, such as it existed at the start of the twentieth century. The Montreal artist is known for installations containing her own hand-made objects, which she uses to reconstruct karaoke lounges, restaurants, opium dens and chinoiserie curio shops.
The exhibition Nous sommes tous des brigands / We are all Robbers implies, with a certain degree of humour, that art, economy and culture take shape through theft. This “culture of theft”—or “borrowing”—speaks to contemporary issues relating to the mishandling of copyright and the concept of the authenticity of art, as the gatekeepers of tradition would have it. Bolder minds, however, would see these phenomena as simply adjustments to a new reality. The artist’s installations featured at EXPRESSION comprise objects she made in the period from 2008-17: cyanotypes, cut-outs, papier mâché vases, pagodas and miniature Chinese arches or gateways, along with objects collected in the Maskoutain region of Québec. Since 2016, Karen Tam has been exploring new creative veins in terms of the missionary activities conducted by the Jesuitsin Quebec, which led to the creation of the Museum of Chinese Art, as well as other activities that will not fail to recall a certain phenomenon summed up in the expression Buy a Chinese baby!
The exhibition Nous sommes tous des brigands / We are all Robbers is presented in conjunction with the Musée régional de Rimouski, where it will run from February 15 to May 27, 2018.
Guided tour and opening, Saturday, November 11, 2017, at 2 p.m.
Karen Tam, video of the exhibition Nous sommes tous des brigands / We are all robbers presented at EXPRESSION, 1 min 59 s. © NousTV
Aux confins du visible
A two-part exhibition presented at Plein sud, centre d’exposition en art actuel in Longueuil, from February 17 to April 7, 2018, and at EXPRESSION until April 22, 2018.
The work of Denis Farley has long been remarkable for its sustained attention to visual systems. Darkrooms, remote surveillance devices and astronomy observatories have constituted the thematic underpinning for an art practice highlighting observation sites and optical “instruments.” Photography, itself a sort of vision machine, has also undergone considerable scrutiny. Farley’s approach to art-making is motivated by a desire to question the visible as it pertains both to his subjects and to the forms in which he chooses to represent them.
More recently, Farley has built on his previous achievements with a modified approach focused on the world of the infra-visible: data streams, waves, algorithms and other electrical pulses involved in instantaneous communication and the cross-platform sharing of images are his new objects of inquiry. But how is it possible to represent such intangible elements? Transmission, relay and information-capture systems, along with data management and storage apparatuses (e.g. the cloud), are amenable to representation in the same way that the strength of the wind is conveyed by the trees it bends. Farley has decided to represent them, to help us see—or at least envision—what is concealed from sight.
This exhibition will focus Farley’s last decade of work with these phenomena. While it is not a retrospective it will reframe, by presenting works that plumb the limits of the visible, the paradigm of vision so implicit in Farley’s early works.
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Opening at Plein sud at 1 p.m.
Opening and guided tour at EXPRESSION at 3:30 p.m.