at the espace GM 509
Manif d’art presents
Toi/You, The Meeting
May 1 to June 15, 2008
Opening May 1 at 6 p.m.
Espace GM at 509 rue Saint-Joseph Est
Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Thursday and Friday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Admission: MANIF-CARTE required
Activities: Guided tours Tuesday through Sunday (groups must reserve) / free
Creation workshops for youth Tuesday through Friday (reservations only) / 1 per person
Family workshop Saturday and Sunday at 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. / $5 per person (participants must bring a t-shirt to transform)
 Photo : © Dominique Angel |
Pièces supplémentaires, 2008 Dominique Angel (Marseille, France) Multidisciplinary |
| Well known for his humour and hybrid, multidisciplinary approach, Dominique Angel casts his gaze at the same themes as the Manif d’art 4. Rencontres, leurres et déchirures / couple amour et érotisme / toi le regardeur / identité altérité, are pretexts for a fictional scenario in which the artist puts himself in the spotlight |
Relève
 Photo : © Louis Audet |
Wireless/Marchander le vide, 2008 Thierry Arcand-Bossé (Québec city, Québec) Painting |
| “Wireless Internet connection marks a new step in the world of communication. Airwaves transmitting a multitude of information surround us. Because the dictatorship of the market modulates our lives, we understand that the air has commercial value. Because emptiness itself—the space between beings, the invisible space we share—is exchanged on stock markets, we could conclude that the domain of real contact with others is somehow contaminated.” |
 Photo : © Isabelle Bernier |
La malédiction de la Grande Pyramide (égyptomanie), 2008 Isabelle Bernier (Montréal, Québec) Web art |
| In 1822, a young French thinker by the name of Champollion managed to decipher the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphs. In this piece of beb art, Champollion’s fondest wish comes true: to visit Egypt and contemplate the Great Pyramid. Unfortunately the dream sours… This site is part of a current collective project exploring the theme of the Rosetta Stone. www.egyptomania.ca www.isabellebernier.ca
Acknowledgements: Canada Council for the Arts |
Emerging
 Photo : © César Gabriel Burgos Salcedo |
Niño efímero, 2008 César Gabriel Burgos Salcedo (Colima, Mexique) Installation |
| El Gigante ou Le Géant appartient à la série Fiesta Popular ou Fête Populaire dans laquelle le public interagit avec la pièce exposée en la détruisant, tel qu’on le fait dans les fêtes mexicaines dont l’élément central est la traditionnelle Piñata.
Remerciements : Office Québec-Amériques pour la jeunesse et Secretaria de Cultura de Colima |
 Photo : © Doyon / Rivest |
Le siècle des lumières, 2008 Doyon/Rivest – Mathieu Doyon (Québec city, Québec) et Simon Rivest (Montréal, Québec) Photography |
| Well known for their take on advertising, the duo invite us here to a poetic but disturbing world. An obscure, encompassing image reveals a series of portraits lighted by the small screens of portable electronic devices: cell phones, mp3 players… These sources of light only reveal faces, which seem to float in an undetermined space, creating an intimate atmosphere that makes us think of the beauty of stars. |
Emerging
 Photo : © Rosalie Dumont-Gagné |
Attracteurs étranges, 2007-2008 Rosalie Dumont-Gagné (Montréal, Québec) Sound installation |
| She is interested in our individual and collective dreams. For the Manif d’art 4, she proposes a sound installation designed to develop over time. The visitor is invited to contribute to the sounds emitted by objects with organic silhouettes by whispering secrets or other private communications into them, all the while retaining a certain anonymity.
Acknowledgments: Bill Vorn & A-Lab @ Hexagram, Concordia |
 Photo : © Murielle Dupuis Larose |
Chanson de Marie, 2007-2008 Murielle Dupuis Larose (Québec city, Québec) Audio video projection |
| “Her name is Marie. She is my mother. She is 84-years old. Beautiful, someone who gathers others, she is strong and self-assured. However, when she sings a childhood song for us, her voice falters. Partons, la mer est belle… and we suddenly realize how frail she is. This song is a thread woven through her life. I wish to speak of this deeply engrained memory.”
Acknowledgments : Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec |
 Photo : © Laurent Fièvet |
Circulations, 2003-2007 Laurent Fièvet (Paris, France) Video installation |
| A film by Hitchcock becomes the pretext for an installation in which two protagonists remain separated, prisoners of their respective screens. Seduction gradually become apparent, despite the gap. The manipulated motifs of the original film become metaphors for a love relationship. Through acceleration and distance, the new piece becomes a reflection of current courting rituals.
Acknowledgments: Galerie La Ferronnerie, Galerie Ramakers |
 Photo : © Andrew Forster |
Duet, 2007 Andrew Forster (Montréal, Québec) Installation/video projection |
| Andrew Foster is known for an interdisciplinary approach that calls on the collaboration of creators from various disciplines. Duet bridges video and performance to explore social and political issues. In a choreography marked first by the desire to calm and then by the frenzy of emergency, two performers reproduce the movements of Hassam Abdo, a young Israeli kamikaze captured in 2004.
Acknowledgments: Push-Montréal/Compagnie André Forestier |
Emerging
 Photo : © Pierre-Olivier Fréchet-Martin |
Continuum, 2008 Pierre-Olivier Fréchet-Martin (Québec city, Québec) Heat-sensitive painting |
| Bordering on painting, digital art and video, Continuum is a reflection on our relation with the memory of an event and where it took place. Predicated on sequences that represent public spaces, the artist proposes a nostalgic look at the singular and fleeting character of interpersonal contact. He creates a profoundly poetic experience in praise of slowness.
Acknowledgments : Hélène Langlet, Pierre Desmarais, Lucille Fréchet, Michel Martin |
 Photo : © Diane Landry |
Les eaux volées, 2007 Diane Landry (Québec City, Québec) Praxinoscope |
| Diane Landry poetically invests in intimacy by transforming objects of daily use. Here, she presents the portrait of a woman in a washing machine… Like a praxinoscope, an antique method of producing moving images, the agitator makes the woman move in ways that are as choppy as a wash cycle or as quick as a spin cycle, creating sequences that are strongly metaphoric.
Acknowledgments: Canada Council for the Arts |
 Photo : © Guy L’Heureux |
Emmêler, 2008 Christine Major (Montréal, Québec) Painting |
| Christine Major pursues research into our ambiguous relationship with animals, the “others” that inhabit our daily lives and imaginations. A projection of self, unbounded affection, mute complicity… In a series shown for the first time, she amplifies the troubled nature of these ties and explores the power of these projections of the body in images.
Acknowledgments: The generous participants of the project “Animaux et Cie” in the context of the 25th Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul. |
Emerging
 Photo : © Mayra Martell Rodriguez |
Utopic Portrait of Identity, 2005-2007 Mayra Martell Rodriguez (Chihuahua, Mexico) Photography |
| In June 2003, the international press was shaken by the official declaration that thousands of women had disappeared from the village of Juarez. Mayra Martell decided to investigate, seeking to grasp the phenomenon by creating portraits of the missing women, thereby questionning a definition of identity: what happened to their families, the contexts of their lives; when did their lives become like fiction?
Acknowledgments : Office Québec-Amériques pour la jeunesse |
 Photo : © Pascal Martinez |
Objet de convoitise II, 2006 Pascal Martinez (Marseille, France) Video installation |
| Pascal Martinez seems to want to capture the world through colourless but always enigmatic events. He enjoys working on memory, on what we accept and refuse to forget. In this video, a young man removes his shirt and reveals a tattoo. He removes it again and again. Desire. Endless desire? Or desire questioned through repetition? |
 Photo : © Paul Litherland |
Auditorium, 2008 Christof Migone (Montréal, Québec) Video and sound installation |
| Well known for his projects in sound experimentation, Christof Migone proposes the image of a group of individuals outfitted in headphones. Their body language, subtle reactions and facial expressions are the only clues to what they are hearing. However, the public is offered a set of headphones with which it can share the experience, alone or with others. Will it accept?
Acknowledgments: Canada Council for the Arts |
Emerging
 Photo : © Louis Côté |
Zone d’isolement, 2007-2008 Anne-Marie Ouellet (Montréal, Québec) Installation |
| Anne-Marie Ouellet pursues her exploration into refuges and collective zones of isolation. In a room resembling a bunker, she invites the public to put on cowls, creating an ambivalent environment where she greets and assembles visitors while isolating them. Follow the directions.
Acknowledgments: Canada Council for the Arts |
 Photo : © Eva Quintas |
Le Ravissement, 2007 Eva Quintas (Montréal, Québec) Video installation |
| Screens broadcast images from separate times and spaces. Are we in a painting or in a real space? In a series of scenes behind closed doors, various characters meet or clash. The word ravissement (rapture) metaphorically and theatrically evokes virtual and physical meeting: desire, fusion, possession, subjugation, illusions and disillusions of union and distance. |
 Photo : © Johanne Huot |
Atikamekw forêt, 2008 Anton Roca (Spain/Italy) Installation / performance |
| The themes of identity and alterity deeply mark Anton Roca’s work in performance, photography and installation. Here, they evoke his surprising meeting with an Attikamekw elder on the north shore of the Gouin reservoir. Hours spent talking with this wise man and an interpreter. Mutual availability and the skilful bargaining of the elder and the interpreter set into motion a game of acclimatization and control, of spoken presence and silent transmission.
Acknowledgments : François Chachai, Rémond Weizineau et |
 Photo : © Lyla Rye |
Subdue, 2002-2008 Lyla Rye (Toronto, Canada) Video installation |
| Subdue explores the complex issues of the mother-child relationship. The sound of a children’s rhyme invites us to penetrate a narrow space. The images of a woman and a child perturb our understanding of the scene. This woman appears to be speaking but we don’t hear her. The child blocks its ears. We nevertheless manage to hear a voice that seeks to reach out and calm. |
 Photo : © Jacques Samson |
Sculpture de sauvetage, 2007-2008 Jacques Samson (Québec City, Québec) Action/Sculpture |
| Active in Québec City’s arts scene for the last 15 years though his involvement in cultural organizations and participation in various collective projects, Jacques Samson pursues his work with surprising organically-shaped objects. This project of inflatable sculptures emerging from the hulls of rescue canoes reflects a desire to experience art as a lifesaving encounter. Like itinerant sculptures, these unusual buoys turn up by surprise in public spaces. |
Emerging
 Photo : © Meera Margaret Singh |
Lakes Are Frozen, Trees Are Bare, 2006 Meera Margaret Singh (Montréal, Québec) Photography |
| Meera Margaret Singh’s work is motivated by a desire to enter into contact with individuals who become actors in various narrations. She transforms their daily lives to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Within these fragmented narrations, the artist blurs the line between fiction and reality. A certain emotional tension is played out, shedding light on a disturbance whose cause or outcome cannot be named. |
 Photo : © Valentin Stefanoff and Nina Kovacheva |
Au-delà du visible, 2003-2004 Nina Kovacheva et Valentin Stefanoff (Bulgaria / Paris, France) Outdoor video projection |
| Valentin Stefanoff and Nina Kovacheva are originally from Sofia, Bulgaria. Since 2000 they have worked as a duo in Europe and in Paris, where they live. The image of oversized characters is projected on the street-level windows of an insignificant building. They seem to be speaking to passers-by. Although silent, the video nevertheless establishes a dialogue with the spectator. Indifference, anonymity and the refusal to communicate are paradoxically addressed through the orchestration of individual encounters in the social arena. |
 Photo : © Élène Tremblay |
Le canari, 2008 Élène Tremblay (Otterburn Park, Québec) Conception and realisation of the mecanisme : Diane Morin Video installation |
| Élène Tremblay uses photography, video and network-art to explore her areas of interest. Having recently worked on the theme of empathy, she proposes a video installation in which she puts herself in the spotlight. Piercing cries seem to come from something hidden under a veil, which is alternately lifted and lowered. Underneath: the artist, nude, crouched and wearing a beak, personifying… a canary.
Acknowledgments: Le Hangar, Barcelona and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (studio-residence program). |
Emerging
 Photo : © Mathieu Valade |
Bunker, 2008 Mathieu Valade (Québec City, Québec) Installation |
| It is an ordinary construction, strongly lighted. We are invited to enter. It harbours a magical environment: a starry vault and a sound like that of crickets. A warm and inviting bed for two suggests that visitors could make themselves comfortable and take advantage of the atmosphere to share a moment of intimacy with a friend or stranger.
Acknowledgments: Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec |
at the espace GM 840
Manif d’art presents
Toi/You, The Meeting
May 1 to June 15, 2008
Opening May 1 at 6 p.m. at Espace GM 509
Opening of Espace GM 840 at 7 p.m.
Espace GM at 840 rue Saint-Joseph Est
Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Admission: MANIF-CARTE required
Activities:
Guided tours Tuesday through Sunday (groups must reserve) / free
 Photo : © André Barrette |
Marry me Lori ?, 2007 André Barrette (Québec City, Québec) Photography |
| Advertising banners pulled by a plane flying over the beaches of Maine give rise to poetic, old-fashioned images. Blown-up negatives, a colour that suggests a fake historical aesthetic and the manipulation of fleeting visual signs allow the images to shift into a sort of improbable fiction. |
 Photo : © Carl Bouchard et Martin Dufrasne |
Point de rupture, 2008 Carl Bouchard (Chicoutimi, Québec) et Martin Dufrasne (Montréal, Québec) Photographic installation |
| Brothers, lovers, enemies, mutually amplified or cancelled, the duo puts itself in the spotlight to explore questions of identity and alterity in various theatrically inspired role-playing games. They address the subject of gaps and distance, the vantage points from which it is possible to guess, invent, dream or think of the other.
Acknowledgments: Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec |
Emerging
 Photo : © Jacynthe Carrier |
À interférence, 2007-2008 Jacynthe Carrier (Québec City, Québec) Video and sound installation |
| A strange video canvas that evokes classical painting and moving images. A field of electrical pylons like a scar on the landscape. In it, two individuals manipulate communication tools: megaphones, headphones, speakers, extension cords, electric cables… A tableau vivant with multiples interferences.
Acknowledgments: La Bande Vidéo |
Emerging
 Photo : © Marie-Andrée Cormier |
Aller-retour, 2008 Marie-André Cormier (Québec City, Québec) Video installation |
| Two people ceaselessly move from one screen to another without ever seeing each other. They meet, turn round and round, follow one another. In fine alienation, they seek to parade their identity while receiving that of the other. A relationship is built. |
 Photo : © Jean Dubois et Chloé Lefebvre |
À portée de souffle, 2007-2008 Jean Dubois (Montréal, Québec) Avec la collaboration spéciale de Chloé Lefebvre Site-specific telematic installation |
| “Air is a shameless, colourless, odourless and almost silent fluid, so we sometimes forget that its spread is broad, volatile and branched. It insinuates itself into our bodies before penetrating someone else. With each breath, we apparently absorb a few atoms inhaled by Buddha, Adolf Hitler or Marilyn Monroe. With each breath, we embrace without even thinking about it an inexpressible part of humanity as a whole.”
Acknowledgments: Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), Interstices: Groupe de création en arts médiatiques, Groupe Molior, École des arts visuels et médiatiques of UQAM, Hexagram |
 Photo : © Phil Irish |
I’ll meet you there, 2008 Phil Irish (Elora, Canada) Painting |
| Phil Irish gathers the stories shared with him through impromptu meetings in places marked by happy or unhappy events, by rituals or passages: parents and their newborn in a clinic, a prisoner converting to religion, lovers disclosing their secret hideaway. The confrontation of his subjective experience raises questions about sharing and interpretation through pictorial compositions in which text and image weave landscapes that are dreamlike and mysterious.
Acknowledgments: Le Centre Mère-Enfant, CHUL |
 Photo : © Zilvinas Kempinas |
Flying Tape, 2004-2008 Zilvinas Kempinas (Lituania / New-York, U.S.A) Installation |
| The Flying Tape relies on a very simple mechanism: a magnetic band is suspended in a fan-driven vortex of air, filling space with sinuous movement that allows the public to choose between contemplation and participation in this strange choreography. Both fragile and monumental, it poetically challenges and confronts the laws of gravity. |
Emerging
 Photo : © Guillaume Légaré |
Le Paravent de la Gloire, 2008 Guillaume Légaré (Québec City, Québec) Lacquer on wood |
| He has accustomed us to heavily-laden, ornamental work. Here he proposes a pictorial object made of delicately executed lacquer. The cut-out partitions authorize libertine behaviour and erotic encounters. A separation of physical space but also the delimitation of two imagined worlds. “The object screen” through which sexuality and sensuality emerge becomes a metaphor for some of our contemporary relationships.
Acknowledgments : Julia Hosteing, Paryse Martin, Huguette |
 Photo : © Dimitrije Martinovic |
The Exquisite Folly of the Event and its Participants, 2007 Dimitrije Martinovic (Ex-Yougoslavia / Toronto, Canada) photography |
| Behind these bucolic and erotic scenes lies the memory of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The shock felt when the famous canvas was first shown is transposed to the present, revealing a deep feeling of self-destruction. Between discomfort and compassion, which role will we choose: voyeur or judge? |
 Photo : © Pascal Grandmaison |
Rien de tout cela, 2008 Serge Murphy (Montréal, Québec) Installation |
| “I want to show what is. Add up everything that belongs to you, tightrope walker of learned shops. And transform everything you touch. You know that there is nothing beyond that. Around us, the void is full. Daily life is eternal. These wool and cotton threads are the veins and arteries in which your blood beats.”
Acknowledgments : Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec |
Emerging
 Photo : © Josée Pedneault and Christophe Collette |
From Warsaw with love, 2006 Josée Pedneault (Montréal, Québec) Photography |
| A visual correspondence for four months between two lovers. She lives in Montréal; he in Warsaw. A correspondence born of a desire to maintain a tangible link, born of the desire to describe to the other an inaccessible reality. A long photographic sequence similar to a series of visual haikus.
Acknowledgments : Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec |
 Photo : © Samuel Rousseau courtesy : galery: Parker’s Box |
Le festin des délices, 2007 Samuel Rousseau (Grenoble, France) Video installation, projection in dinner plates |
| Ironic, delightful, insolent, profane, poetic, modest and fabulous. These are the adjectives used to describe this short video presentation: an elegant table set for lovers, impeccable place settings, a brilliantly white tablecloth and… something in the still empty plates! |
Emerging
 Photo : © Adriana Salazar |
Despreocupadas et Llorona/Machines dysfonctionnelles, 2008 Adriana Salazar (Bogotà, Colombia) Kinetic objects |
| Originally from Colombia, Adriana Salazar creates dysfunctional machines that highlight simple and repetitive human gestures in a critical and fun look at interpersonal relationships. Sometimes the mechanics are unsynchronized; sometimes emotions are disembodied. If the artist’s work speaks to technological developments, these strange objects take on a special evocative power in the context of social interchange in Colombia.
Acknowledgments: Programa Presidencial Colombia Joven and Office Québec-Amériques pour la jeunesse |
 Photo : © Michel Daigneault and Stephen Schofield |
Jusqu’au bout des lèvres, 2008 Michel Daigneault et Stephen Schofield (Montréal, Québec) Installation |
| One is a painter; the other draws… Based on the theme of the beloved, this collaborative project bears witness to the work of a couple in a shared studio. The pictorial and sculptural piece explores the limits of public and private, the tumult of figuration and abstraction, and the vulnerability and resistance of the body and its capacity for eroticism and humour. |