MixedMedia

3 exhibitions: Ingenious3. Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Feb10 – Apr22.07.

Jean-Pierre Gauthier | Jérôme Fortin | Guy Ben-Ner

I always like to go to the musée d’art contemporain here in Montreal, on Wednesday evenings. Not only because it’s free after 6pm, but because the atmosphere is electric. The place is crowded, mostly with young art students from the local universities and cegeps (colleges) and artists like my husband, photographer Sol Lang and me, (he always accompanies me on my artistic adventures), all with a great hunger for what we will find at the museum. Needless to say, we are not often disappointed. There is lots of activity, everyone is “drinking-in” the atmosphere and the art. It’s a place to meet and to share. To feel as if we are all part of this greater whole called art.

Jean-Pierre Gauthier. Before entering the main exhibition, we hear the music of a piano coming from a doorway to the side of the main entrance. Upon entering the dimly lit room, we are greeted by a baby grand piano, spot lit from above giving a theatrical ambiance. But wait! There is no one at the keyboard. It is electronically hooked up to wires and pistons pulling the piano keys in some random sequence. The result is a strange composition that seems to include chords and notes, but no specific melody that could make one walk away humming… The piano and the seat holding the electronic hardware are beautifully and randomly covered in a silver metallic duct tape. This is our introduction to Mr. Jean-Pierre Gauthier, the first of three artists who will challenge our thoughts about what art is or what it should be. For an artist like me, this new task of coming to review a museum exhibition, has stimulated and activated different neurons in my brain and all my senses are somehow alerted in a different way. It’s a new challenge and therefore a new thrill. Gauthier’s kinetic “über-hybrid installations” entertain and seduce the crowds. People love it when things move and make sounds!

Mr. Gauthier works with found objects as metaphors (dog leashes, garbage bags, etc), that move with subtle wiring hanging from the ceiling, and they speak to you like magic. His “uncertainty marker” series are like spiders or dream-catchers that are roving around making subtle and beautiful drawings on the wall. This show of works reminds us of DaVinci, with his inventions using everyday objects, put together in a magical, child-like manner.

In another room, we find 6 earphones, hanging from wiring crossing the ceiling and walls, coming down to greet the observer and beckoning them to listen to the different parts to the large installation. My mechanically minded husband was a great translator for me… sound mixers, clamps, speakers, logic boards, electric wiring, amplifiers, electric motors, plastic ties and tubing, all making up a very complex and organic installation, called “The Sound of Things – Semaphores and Brooms”. Lots of vibration and sound. A very powerful piece.

And yet another room, this time we find large metal springs, moving systematically grating against individual mirrors, like chalk on a black board. The sound vibrates throughout the room, as museum docents walk around with a large entourage, giving talks explaining in great detail and with great enthusiasm to their very captive audience which hangs on every word. This is the excitement of free Wednesdays.

Jérôme Fortin. This artist works with all things that you can find and pickup for free… lottery forms, maps, museum schedules, japanese manga comic strips, yellow pages, coloring books. I love this room, with its very large pieces of folded paper, measuring approx. 10 feet x 15 feet, each. Jérôme Fortin‘s works are hypnotic and meditative, it’s like basket weaving, and Sol and I chuckled that he must be the sanest person around. An unbelievable display of hand dexterity. It moved me because I sensed the art’s zen quality. It was done with an artistic temperament in mind, and it speaks to the emotions. It provokes but does not propagandize. We enjoyed a short video of the making of the installations, which was also very zen.

Guy Ben-Ner. Treehouse Kit and video. My impressions were that this piece was conceptual and not that interesting in terms of the visual appeal. It was mostly about a Robinson Crusoe like character, building a tree house from a table and two chairs, and then dismantling it and re-building a bunk bed… Guy Ben-Ner‘s work is too heady for me, and uninteresting visually. Although I did see that his art brings out a child-like quality and playfulness, and many people did seem fascinated by it. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.

After a couple of hours and several large rooms later, looking at several pieces of art, we ended up on a comfy bench in the main welcoming area, and began a very interesting talk with a very friendly museum guard, hungry for human interaction. As we started a long conversation, he gave us many wonderful insights into the exhibition, which took as much as two weeks to put up, and he recounted having seen the artists while they were installing the show, and that he’d had some very philosophic chats with the artists who explained what their works were about and that was a thrill!
Mary Bogdan

I’m looking forward to visiting Montreal this weekend with my family. In particular, looking forward to a visit to the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal where three quirky exhibitions are on view. One of them is a showing of recent large-scale works by the Canadian assemblage artist Jérôme Fortin, who has been on a swift rise over the last decade.  Here is what the MACM website has to say about the works on view:

The new Écrans series, inspired by Japanese Zen gardens, comprises nine large-scale elements that unfurl in an imposing procession through the exhibition space. In it, the artist takes up where he left off in the exhibition L’Envers des apparences presented at the museum in 2005. Made out of ordinary printed matter (sketchbooks, issues of Artforum magazine, posters, manga comic strips, colouring books, Yellow Pages directories and road maps), these works are attached straight onto the wall. They are consequently ephemeral and will be destroyed in the dismantling process, in accordance with the artist’s wishes.

With repeated gestures, patience and time, Fortin tirelessly develops a work by folding and gluing, turning paper screens into murals, raising seriality to the level of fascination, and producing pictorial spaces in which the viewers readily lose themselves. Exhibition curator Sandra Grant Marchand sums up the artist’s approach as follows: “We are speaking of an oeuvre that brings together the visual experience of a work defined by its materiality and the contemplative experience of a work informed by a kind of immateriality.”

Thanks so much, Lars, for that beautiful welcome, I really appreciate it. I’m thrilled to be joining this quickly growing, enthusiastic group of mixed media art aficionados.

I wanted to write a bit about my process in creating the 13 pieces, called “Madonna & Child OR Re-parenting My Inner Child”, series #3, which were meant to be sent to the 9th International Collage Exhibition and Exchange in New Zealand. Upon completion of the series, I had some reservations about sending them. The point of the exchange is for artists from all over the world to exhibit and exchange works with one another, which would have meant that my pieces would be gone from me forever. I am not one for letting my art go too easily, if at all. But that is fodder for yet another article. I gathered all my internal strength and decided to send the works, only to discover that due to strict New Zealand laws about the importing of plant and organic materials (in order to protect their own plant life), my works would be stopped at the customs entry point because I used dried leaves, parsley, twigs, hibiscus bloom, etc., in many of my collages. “Fair enough”, I thought, as I jumped for joy (on the inside). I cannot send them, so I’ll just have to keep them, and try again next year with a different series and without the plant material.

Here are a few thoughts about how I went about conceiving and creating this series of thirteen.

I originally started with a very large image (see above), measuring approx. 70 inches x 17 inches, which I composed in Photoshop, in several layers. This would divide up into the images needed for the thirteen collages. I combined the digital art images from the Madonna & Child Or Re-parenting My Inner Child, series no 1 and series no 2, which I had made earlier and which had just been on exhibit at Arts Sutton, Québec.

The next step was to print out this very large digital art creation on archival watercolor paper, then, cut them down to size, all 10 inches x 8.5 inches. Now, I had thirteen separate pieces to have fun with, (not that the previous step wasn’t fun). I took them to my studio and after laying them all out, started the collage work. At first, I intuitively felt that they all needed a pouch or envelope of some sort, with other smaller objects inside of them. I proceeded to scrounge around my studio for appropriate objects. Please remember that I am a great gleaner, and have hundreds, if not thousands of items that I’ve collected over the years. And so I used a few of them: little bits of paper, plastic pouches, an old american express credit card, valentines heart doily, stamped envelopes, my husbands old driver’s license, parking receipt stubs, rotary club membership card, bubble gum wrapper, tea bag wrapper, museum entry ticket, human hair (my own), doctor’s prescription slip, twigs and leaves, Hershey’s chocolate bar wrapper, wine bottle foil wrapper, ribbon, laundry tags, coupon slips, and more. Then came the more irreverent objects. The pages torn from the bible, Hebrew scriptures, dictionary, poetry books… All items that have come into my life, and were collected over many years. All rich with symbolism and meaning.

I painted and glued these items over the original digital art printouts, and together the two (old and the new) worlds collided to form a rich, full world of their own.

After completing all thirteen collages in one, very long, sitting, I left them alone in my studio. When I returned a few days later, I saw that they had dried, but were quite crumpled and curled, no doubt from all the paint and gel medium. Unhappy with their physical appearance, and after much thought (and several sleepless nights) about what to do, I proceeded to use an iron to flatten them out. This was a fantastic experience, because some of the papers burned a bit and lots of the plastic pouches also burned and opened up to reveal the inside contents. Thus the creative process continues, as one never knows what’s going to happen, exactly; and that’s the thrill – the relinquishing of control, and the willingness to give oneself up to the process of creation.

So, what we see above here, as thumbnails, are the final series of 13 collages, after much layering, creating, ironing, and finally, pressing under a large stack of very heavy art books (Tàpies, Clavé, Rauschenberg, Cornell, Johns, Twombly, Dine, Nevelson, Herms, Christo). After couple of weeks, they flattened out beautifully, and gained a very rustic, ancient look about them. I was very happy.

And so, over a span of a few weeks, and many different stages, this work revealed itself to me, through its many transitions and transformations, to its ultimate… transcendence.

To see the final 13 collages and their earlier stages in larger format, click here.

Nick Bantock, the celebrated illustrator, writer and yes collage artist bares some of his trade secrets in this lush volume from Chronicle Books. Nick writes it best:

Imagine a young woman sitting in the accounts payable department of an Italian trading office in 1910. The afternoon is dragging interminably. She drifts into a reverie and starts to doodle on the invoice in front of her. Like many educated people of the time, she can draw with reasonable competence. She sketches the faces of her coworkers as she remembers them at the recent New Year’s fancy-dress party. The result of this graphic detour is a fascinating mixture of period commerce and art.

Is it important that she never actually put pencil to paper and that it is you or I who decides to act out her part for her? Is the invoice worth less because we have created a fiction over a fact? Surely what matters is the degree of poignant emotion evoked by the resultant piece of paper.

I love the idea of a creativity that honors the effects of time and makes mischief with history. Growing up in a society where hard, cold, and shiny are often highly valued, I find myself gravitating toward the opposite. Snow-blinded by bleached white paper, I crave smoky patina and shadowy aged surfaces.

Urgent 2nd Class is a handbook for those who wish to learn how to embellish and tamper with old documents, envelopes, and other ephemeral scraps. Its intended purpose is to bring into focus an art form that has barely been identified, let alone described.

I hope this volume begins to remedy that lapse, as well as encourage and stimulate innate creativity.

Learn more about Nick Bantock and his work at NickBantock.com 

These days it seems that way to me: I keep finding the coolest people doing great work north of the 45th parallel. My most recent encounter is Gerard Dubois, a French illustrator with a light, classical touch, who lives with his family in Montréal, Canada.  He seems to get around quite a bit, selling corporate work, as well as clip art and book design.  Check out his lovely site at gdubois.com.