L’espace en dialogues

Janick : Hi! I missed the installation, but I followed you on Facebook. I was eager to see the works in place. They really are everywhere: outside in the hallway, on the floor and the ceiling. And you even told me that Martine Viale was doing a performance in your office. We’re discovering all kinds of nooks and crannies at CIRCA.

Geneviève : Yes, you’re right. There is an effect of emptiness and fullness; the first section of the gallery is stripped bare and behind the wall, it is stuffed, almost overflowing!

Janick : Does it actually work: the idea of a dialogue between the pieces?

Geneviève : Yes, but ultimately the works interact more than we anticipated! There are formal and conceptual reminders that come from all directions. The four themes of the exhibition guide our gaze as we move from one work to another. The general idea is to explore what space might be, going beyond its three-dimensionality.

Jade : Um, if I remember well, the topics are Fictional Space, Everyday Space, Space-Time and finally Architecture and Utopia.

Janick : The works of Andréanne and Fratzel greet us with the first theme of Fictional Space: shifting literary experience into the exhibition space. With her stairs that lead nowhere, Andréanne sets up a fantastic story in which everything is possible. It reminds me of Jack and the Beanstalk or Alice in Wonderland.

Jade : With Fratzel’s work, we can make associations to both detective novels and comic books. We arrive at a reorganized crime scene. We become the inspector.

Geneviève : Yes. In Fratzel’s installation, the balloons add a tragic/comic aspect that also appears in Alexis’s painting Station/3.

Janick : But Alexis’s work addresses the subject of Everyday Space: between poetry and derision as do the works of the two performers Mathieu and Martine. It’s still amazing to bring painting and performance together under the same theme.

Geneviève : Yes in principle, but Alexis places his models in performative situations: he’s no stranger to performance related issues. His models are well acquainted. Their daily intimacy and familiarity is also captured and highlighted in his painting.

Janick : As for Mathieu, he’s more interested in everyday objects used at work or during our free time. His actions play with the shifting functionality of objects. This changes our perception of them.

Jade : Interesting. The spaces of daily life are taken in very different directions. Martine is more interested in mundane places, like the office at CIRCA. She works with the floor, the one we can’t see anymore and she highlights it through her actions. Moreover, on this floor there is a fragment of a painting by Angèle Verret, a site specific installation created in 2013 when the area was an exhibition space.

Janick : This space has changed its vocation. Time passes and everything is transformed.

Jade : Yes, and we can imagine places in completely inventive ways. François, Jane and Michal do so in their own fashion. Their works come together under the theme of Space-Time: the history of imaginative science. There’s a bit of madness in these pieces.

Geneviève : And yes, François’s work resembles inventions dating from Leonardo da Vinci while Jane and Michal’s Re-Collect installation is like a futuristic, robotic tree.

Jade : In both cases, we see the expertise and technology, but from completely opposing temporal poles.

Janick : Personally Jane and Michal’s Re-Collect fascinates me. I like their procedure: capturing ambient sounds, and re-transmitting them with sounds from other spaces where the work has been presented previously. If you think about it, what we hear are the physical and temporal spaces moved into the here and now of the small gallery. A kind of Back to the Future remixed!

Jade : It’s funny that you suggest music because the work is now placed in the small gallery where there is a very strong echo. I wonder how the sound of this place will become part of the work’s sound memory?

Geneviève : We might say that we are moving from high tech to low tech with François’s portable sculpture. His work, assemblages of natural materials and the cannon shape, evokes curiosity. It invites our gaze to see nothing, yet somehow offers introspection.

Jade : I find a lot of metaphors in François’s work. His cloud is made from a rubber inner tube that allows no water leakage, and says a lot about the absurd and poetic development of form in his works.

Geneviève : François’s cloud also hangs very evocatively near the paintings by Noémie and Marie-Eve. The works of these two painters fit into the exhibition’s final theme of Architecture and Space: between places and utopia.

Janick : The architecture is at the same time present and erased in both cases. With Noémie, the airfield for helicopters seems to float on the surface of the canvas, like a helicopter would over the ground.

Geneviève : As for Marie-Ève’s paintings, their sequence plays a significant narrative role. The house that is evoked on the surface of the canvas is doubly overgrown with vegetation and the entire universe.

Janick : Strange! Finally, the aerial aspect is present in all of the works: the height of the stairs, the balloons, the floating lights, the cloud, the suggestion of airspace and the vastness of the universe.

Geneviève : So it comes back to the potential of space…

The dialogue can go on for a long time…

Geneviève Goyer-Ouimette has been director of CIRCA art actuel since 2013. She has a BA in Art History and an MA in Museology from University du Québec à Montréal. At the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, she worked in the Department of Conservation and Research, and was responsible for the Collection Prêt d’œuvres d’art (CPOA) (a rental collection of artworks for public agencies). As a curator, she has presented numerous group exhibitions including Projet HoMa (Maison de Culture Maisonneuve and Guido Molinari Foundation) and Ornementation identitaire (Mexican Consulate in partnership with the CALQ and the FONCA). She also presented the survey exhibitions of Catherine Bolduc’s work, Mes châteaux d’air (EXPRESSION Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe and Salle Alfred-Pellan at Maison des arts de Laval) and Eric Ladouceur’s Possession / Knowledge / Power (Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides and Graff Gallery). She has written essays for both artists and art magazines, on the work of Catherine Bolduc, Eveline Boulva, Yvon Chassé, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Éric Ladouceur and Marcel Marois.