Salle 1
JULIE-CHRISTINE FORTIER
Go West Young Man!
Julie-Christine Fortier's work flirts with absence, with disappearance, but equally evokes the expectation of them. In her work, time is summoned up as uncertain, suspended. Fortier leaves the traces of such time in the pieces; sometimes derisory and sometimes marked by the history of cinema, or at least by the memory we might have of it. The video track Vanishing Point (2004), for example, shows us the artist digging a hole with a pick and shovel for almost an hour. This almost mechanical action - tunnel, escape, film scene, treasure hunter - takes part in its own fictionalization by obliging us to linger, to contemplate, and above all to await the response we suspect is absent. In the hope for a climax that never shows, Fortier gradually sinks into the hole she is digging and vanishes. As the artist writes: “in announcing their deliberately suspended and misleading character, the works become the measure of a time inexorably dissolving, giving form to a kind of melancholy emptiness.” If the action implicates the artist in her own disappearance in Vanishing Point, in Domaine quatre saisons (2006), time, nonetheless frozen in its photographing, implies the subject of the image's death, or at least its change. The possibilities are numerous, this suspension of time activates speculation and other possible images; it is only more agitated by the narrative soundtrack. 90.1 FM (2007), a piece comprised of a car radio locked on 90.1 FM, works in this way too. Inextricably tied to a geographical location it either picks up a signal or doesn't. Its relocation thus changes the way the work is read, and at the same time, clouds the road to decoding it through the addition of possible narratives. Go West Young Man! may be a film about the Gold Rush, may be a tragic account of an RV accident, a chase follows, a road trip West, as many ideas as moments of time are brought together in the work. Here, history surely escapes us; we may have arrived too late.
YP.
Translated by PduB
The artist wishes to thank
the Canada Council for the Arts
www.juliecfortier.net
Vanishing Point, 2004. Photo: JCF |
Salle 2
DAN BRAULT
Le small bang
Dan Brault's painting simultaneously draws on codes, history and the medium's genres. Far from a mere game of borrowing and citation the work's main concern is more, as the artist insists, in uniting in a single burst the originating possibilities of a meeting of signs, motifs and the specific stylistic variations of painting's history. Brault thus presents amalgamated pictures, numerous, in triptychs or fixed to the walls in a desire for an aesthetic and semantic equation; the paintings answer and war with each other. It is in the continual reconfiguration, within the space in which it is exhibited, that Dan Brault's work takes on a sense: a “small bang,” a collision of appropriation, a sort of historical round-up or harvest, installed and offered for the reading as a whole. Images, if not techniques, jostle and shove each other in an accumulation of canvases in the space, but also in the imagistic elements that coexists within them. Some of these paintings are composed of numerous details, framed, circumscribed in form, they are also extracted from the recent (or less so) history of painting, as if one were making a synthesis of the lot, albeit eclectic, on a single surface. One might speak of cohabitation - a successful one - of samples, since Brault is sampling, like a DJ, as it pleases him to say. Cutting across the conventions of comics, portraiture, still life and geometric abstraction, the pictorial codes juxtaposed by the artist become a visual phrasing. They form a kind of syntactical composition in which the units, joined, abutted, take part in a medium of thought that is inextricably linked to an aesthetic process.
Holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University and a Master of Fine Arts from Laval University, Dan Brault has presented his work in numerous artist-run centres and galleries in Québec and Canada. He in represented by the Peak Gallery in Toronto.
YP.
Translated by PduB
The artist wishes to thank
the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
www.peakgallery.com
Virus, Diptyque, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2007. Photo: DB |
