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ORANGE 5th edition. Les Viscéraux / Une esthétique de l’appétence
Les Viscéraux / Une esthétique de l’appétence
ORANGE, L’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe 5e édition
Sites
Pavillon EXPRESSION : 495, avenue Saint-Simon, Saint-Hyacinthe
Pavillon ORANGE : 1775, rue des Cascades, Saint-Hyacinthe
Pavillon JAPONAIS : 1767, rue des Cascades, Saint-Hyacinthe
Comté de KAMOURASKA : several exhibition sites
Early life experiences structure our eating habits later on. Beginning with 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. 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 that stems from the same place as hunger and deprivation? 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.
These viscéraux are born artists. Creatively engaged in a perpetual redefinition of the everyday, they create art out of life itself. Thirty artists’ works are presented in the research and exploration laboratory that is ORANGE, twenty in the exhibition section and ten in the performance art residency. The hunger of the world is voracious… and art is visceral.
Opening Saturday, September 19 at 2pm.
Video report on the opening of ORANGE, l’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe - 5th edition, 3 min 9 s. © NousTV
Sur les lieux
Sur les lieux is an overview of Yann Pocreau’s work of the past decade, presenting artworks chiefly dealing with the plastic properties of light in the photographic image. While photographically representing different positions of the body (his own) in singular places, both private and public, he focuses on the architectural possibilities of these sites, whether historically significant, ravaged by the elements or under construction. In his most recent productions, particularly the series Chantiers, Pocreau demonstrates a mastery of light by showing it as it is, without artifice. Compositionally minimalist, these works foreground simple swaths of colour and light, pictorially echoing the 1950s paintings of Plasticiens. In both his early and recent works, Pocreau maintains a constant dialogue between photography and architecture, and the integration of installation in his current practice allows him to leave behind the unique and one-of-a-kind image of photography. By way of an exploration of the photographic image that highlights its artificial nature, he questions the image itself, whether it be through the appropriation and modification of already existing images or by sculpting the exhibition space using skillful light-play.
Sur les lieux presents a new body of work in continuity with recent projects that explore the possibilities of artificial light. An architectural element unique to the exhibition space, the skylight, serves as the starting point for the site-specific work. The work activated by the presence of visitors, deals with the radicalization of light, which here becomes image. In order to properly situate Pocreau’s practice, the exhibition has been designed as an itinerary where new works are presented side by side with older (Définir la lumière locale) and more recent works (Croisements).
Another part of the exhibition Sur les lieux will be on display at the Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides, from May 22 to August 14, 2016
Short film made by Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe students for the exhibition Sur les lieux presented at EXPRESSION, 5 min 26 s.
D.E.Mo
Ongoing project organized in collaboration with the Musée régional de Rimouski
Démonstration. Expérimentation. Monstration.
D.E.Mo stems from Laurent Lamarche’s long-term exploration of optical phenomena and the possibilities that arise when matter is transformed. Being both a process and an end-point, the project serves as a framework for the presentation of preliminary and more developed experiments, for confirming or discarding hypotheses, and for a reflection on the artistic and technological approaches employed by Lamarche. The exhibition centre thus becomes a laboratory. This concept of museum-lab comes from Lamarche’s longstanding practice of privileging a science-fictional approach to image-making, using scientific methods to achieve non-scientific goals. Indeed, Lamarche structures his thought and creative process as might a scientist.
The artworks presented in D.E.Mo include photographic and installation-based experiments with light projection and refraction. The base material and tools that Lamarche uses are at the heart of his approach, although the object as such is not always in the foreground. Indeed, the object is often overshadowed by the atmosphere and images that it generates. It is the base material, particularly material and objects from daily life, that inspire the manipulation and experimenting that characterize his creative process. Lamarche’s creative universe sparks the imagination, evoking, by turns, scanning electron microscope-captured images, the culture of micro-organisms, Spirograph-drawn plane curves or cutting-edge technology.
Situated between aesthetic research, fiction-making and the study of various phenomena, Laurent Lamarche takes pleasure in his self-invented scientist role. His approach is comparable to that of the fantasmagorists, those 18th-century experimenters whose performances brought together awe-inspiring entertainment and didactics. Engaging, immersive and experimental, Lamarche’s multi-facetted museum-lab breeds possibility and de-compartmentalizes disciplines.
Guided visit and vernissage Saturday, February 6 at 2 p.m.
De la quête du sublime au temps de la virtualité
Karoline Georges’ artistic practice deals with the expansion of consciousness and seeks transcendence and the sublime, extracting subtle bodies from rough material in order to attain purified and even virtual experience. In her work, the process of sublimation reveals itself aesthetically, metaphysically and poetically.
Since her artistic beginnings, literature, photography and video have cohabited with performance, sound poetry and, more recently, 3D modeling.
The exhibition presented at EXPRESSION, entitled De la quête du sublime au temps de la virtualité, presents an overview of the past decade of Georges’ exploration of the digital realm, where virtuality, reality and fiction overlap, creating hybrid languages and a unique site of poetization. Whether in Repères, a series of video tableaux showcasing poetic fragments of a dozen North-American and European cities; or in Objets de sublimation, a project that digitally embodies the narrator of her novel Ataraxie and continues her aesthetic quest through 3D modeling; or through the 3D-animated capsules of Programme d’entraînement à l’usage d’une conscience hygiénique, a video project that gives voice to a computer-based creature, Karoline Georges explores the drive to transcend and surpass biological and perceptual limits.
Guided visit and vernissage Saturday, May 21 at 2 p.m.