Major Projects at the Galerie de l’UQAM: Winter-Spring 2017 Program
December 1st, 2016 – For the winter and spring of 2017, the Galerie de l’UQAM unveils a program made up of major exhibitions and many collaborations. The season will open with an exhibition by an exceptional Montrealer, Françoise Sullivan, an important figure of visual arts and contemporary dance in Canada. In parallel, the artist Jonathan Plante will present his recent research on lenticular supports.
This will be followed by a solo exhibition by the Scottish artist Graham Fagen, whose works focuses on the implications of slavery in identity construction and shared cultures. By way of an exhaustive program of parallel activities, this exhibition seeks to open a space for fertile exchange on the memory and impact of slavery and colonialism. At the same time, Galerie de l’UQAM will be one of the satellites of the Geneva Biennale of Moving Images that is to take place in several international sites this year.
In the spring, the intersections between media arts, engineering and sustainable development will be featured thanks to the Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza, while Charles-Antoine Blais Métivier will explore our relationship to technological interfaces, which are increasingly a part of our everyday life.
All this will be complemented by the exhibition Motion which will be travelling to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, the event Passage à découvert, an annual showcase of graduating students in the BA program in visual and media arts, as well as by the continuation of the virtual exhibition The Painting Project.
EXHIBITIONS AT THE GALLERY
January 11 to February 18, 2017
Opening: Tuesday, January 10, 5:30 pm
Françoise Sullivan. Trajectoires resplendissantes
Curator: Louise DéryThe Galerie de l’UQAM is delighted to announce that it will welcome 2017 with a great Montreal artist: Françoise Sullivan. For the occasion, the Galerie director and exhibition curator has brought together a varied set of works by a towering figure in Quebecois and Canadian art history. Under the title Françoise Sullivan. Trajectoires resplendissantes, the exhibition displays Françoise Sullivan’s photographic, choreographic, textual and pictorial work with the aim of foregrounding their formal and symbolic links. Paying little heed to the specific disciplines and production dates, and by favouring the black and white works, the curator revisits the conceptual and experimental developments that punctuate the artist’s production as a whole.
Related activities (selection)
Je parle (1993)
Choreography by Françoise Sullivan
Tuesday, January 10, 2017 (during the opening)
With Ginette Boutin
Conversation between Françoise Sullivan and Louise Déry
Saturday, January 21, 2017, 2 pm
Galerie de l’UQAMDroit debout
Reactualisation of a performance by Françoise Sullivan
Saturday, January 21, 2017, several iterations starting at 3 pm
Galerie de l’UQAM
With Michèle Febvre, Paul-André Fortier, Dana Michel, Christiane Pasquier and others
Jonathan Plante. Angle mort
Graduating Master’s student in Visual and Media Arts, UQAMIn a practice that he characterizes as kinoplastic, Jonathan Plante explores the image’s appearance and movement. The exhibition Angle mort is an installation of paintings and impressions on a lenticular support. According to the viewer’s observation angle, images appear, disappear and transform; the gaze is involved in the display and the body partakes in an experience of the image’s various temporalities. Angle mort is a field of research on visual perception that echoes the op art and kinetic art experimentations of the 1960s-1970s. Through very low tech tinkering the exhibition movement alludes to interactive technologies and a certain fascination with the animated image, and by the same token raises the question regarding the status of the image in a society where attention is constantly lured by movement.
February 24 to April 8, 2017
Opening: Thursday, February 23, 5:30 pm
Graham Fagen
Curator: Louise DéryThe curator Louise Déry is presenting the Scottish artist Graham Fagen’s first solo exhibition in Canada by proposing a video and music-based installation that is emblematic of his research: The Slave’s Lament. The Glasgow artist, who very successfully represented Scotland at the 2015 Venice Biennale, is interested in the slave trade, the inhuman treatment of the deported populations and the Scottish involvement in Jamaica. The title of the work refers to a lyrical poem published in 1792 and which is attributed to the Scottish national poet Robert Burns, who conveyed his abolitionist thoughts within it. Performed by the well-known reggae singer Ghetto Priest and the Scottish Ensemble string quartet, The Slave’s Lament raises national and identity questions and thereby engages in a critique of cultural and social heritage. Several drawings and photographs have been added to this major work in order to allow for a more encompassing extrapolation of the motifs opposing national identity and cultural identity.
Related activity (selection)
AfroScots
Screening programme
Curators: Mother Tongue (Glasgow)
Saturday, February 25, 2017, 2 pm
Galerie de l’UQAM
Artists: Alberta Whittle, Irineu Destourelles, Rayanne Bushell, Tako Taal and other artists to be confirmedAfroScots is a new screening programme of artist film and video encompassing the work of Black artists, who have – in the present and historically – lived, worked and studied in Scotland. AfroScots is a relatively new term describing people of African and Caribbean descent in Scotland which has gained currency in the last decade; it is not a category assigned officially by the government, but rather a grassroots, informal identification. Working across three generations, the programme engages with the negotiation of new and in-flux identities, with shared themes of interpersonal relationships (family, friendship, sexual) and language. Moreover, the programme seeks to open up discussions around the diversity of the arts in Scotland. Mother Tongue is a research-led, independent curatorial practice formed in 2009 by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden.
L’image en mouvement : de Genève à Montréal
Artistic direction: Andrea Bellini
Curators: Caroline Bourgeois, Cecilia Alemani and Elvira Dyangani OseThe Galerie de l’UQAM and the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève are joining forces to present a component of the Biennale of Moving Images 2016. This first collaboration is part of an international dissemination approach for this important event that distinguishes itself from most of the existing biennales by the fact that it is exclusively made up of new works, all of which are produced by the Centre and its partners. Under the artistic direction of Andrea Bellini, the Centre director, in collaboration with the guest curators Caroline Bourgeois (Curator of Fondation Pinault), Cecilia Alemani (Curator and Director of High Line Art, New York) and Elvira Dyangani Ose (Curator of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2015) and with the complicity of Louise Déry, Director of the Galerie de l’UQAM, a selection will be made specifically for Montréal among the 27 new works produced by the Biennale of Moving Images.
April 21 to 29, 2017
Opening: Thursday, April 20, 5:30 pm
Passage à découvert 2017
Graduating students in Visual and Media Arts (BFA), UQAMPassage à découvert is an opportunity to discover the works of tomorrow’s contemporary artists and teachers who will take their place in museums, galleries and schools. The exhibition illustrates the students’ creative vitality, curiosity and freedom and bears witness to recent graduates’ professionalism and the excitement that their projects stir up. Presented each year, this exhibition also reveals the wealth and diversity of the programs offered by the École des arts visuels et médiatiques, which favours a multidisciplinary education.
May 10 to June 17, 2017
Opening: Tuesday, May 9, 5:30 pm
Gilberto Esparza
Curators: Nuria Carton de Grammont and Véronique LeblancThe Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza’s practice sets up a stimulating dialogue between contemporary art, science and new technologies in order to reflect on the impact of human activity on nature. Created with the assistance of researchers (engineers, biologist, robotics engineers, etc.), these works are hybrid entities, half device and half organism, that focus on issues related to the environmental crisis. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada is dedicated to his latest work, Plantas autofotosintéticas, which he has carried out since 2013 in the contexts of various big cities. As Montreal celebrates its 375th anniversary, this installation invites us to envision the sewer network, which criss-crosses the city’s underground and is usually hidden away and outside of public awareness, as a system of real time energy and light production that makes it possible to keep an ecosystem in balance. A series of photographs excerpted from the project Plantas nómadas (2008-2013), a self-sufficient biological robot designed to live on the shores of polluted rivers, will also be displayed at the Maison du développement durable. Several educational outreach activities, to be announced at a future date, will accompany the exhibition.
Charles-Antoine Blais Métivier. Objets de recherche
Graduating Master’s student in visual and media arts (MFA), UQAMThe ubiquity of tactile interfaces and the digitization of media contents are transforming our relationship to the consumption and production of visual objects. While the tactile commands of mobile devices adapt to images to grant them a material and usable property, the technological apparatus is for its part sublimated by the fluidity of the interface that hides its inherent materiality in favour of a relation that is increasingly attuned to its user. Objets de recherche is interested in the intimate relation between users and their mobile devices, as well as in the synesthetic perceptions acquired through an addiction to these personal interfaces. By way of a participative set-up, the exhibition seeks to reveal the cultural or even political conquests that the sensorial experiences of users are now the object of.
TOURING EXHIBITIONS
January 20 to May 14, 2017
Motion
Curators: La Fabrique d’expositions
MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina
Artists: Jean-Pierre Aubé, Patrick Bernatchez, BGL, Caroline Boileau, Michel de Broin, Pascal Grandmaison, Nelson Henricks, Myriam Laplante, Eduardo Menz, Nadia Myre, Chih-Chien Wang
Motion brings together the work of eleven artists from Quebec in an anthology of video pieces on the theme of « motion, » understood in two senses: as movement and as a proposal. The concept of motion takes into consideration the energy that activates as well as the principle that motivates. This double raison d’être initiates often absurd or even preposterous processes and actions in the works exhibited, a sort of infernal circle that directs our attention to the planetary issues of food and energy production. Their reserve supply, which is not always renewable, becomes a test zone crying out for inventive alternatives.
VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
The Painting Project. A Snapshot of Painting in Canada
Curator: Julie Bélisle
Produced by the Galerie de l’UQAM and exhibited online at the Virtual Museum of Canada
www.leprojetpeinture.uqam.ca
Presented as part of the Virtual Museum of Canada, an initiative of Canadian Heritage, The Painting Project includes sixty works by as many artists. Supported by extensive research, it sketches the outlines of current artistic practice in Canada and provides insightful commentary.
The 2017 winter and spring program at the Galerie de l’UQAM is produced with the support of :
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Address and Opening Hours
Galerie de l’UQAM
Pavillon Judith-Jasmin, Room J-R120
1400 Berri, corner of Sainte-Catherine East, Montreal
Berri-UQAM Metro
Tuesday – Saturday, noon to 6 pm
Free admission
Information
Phone: 514 987-6150
www.galerie.uqam.ca
Facebook
Twitter
-30-
Click on image for high resolution version and credit.
Source: Maude N. Béland, Press Relations Officer
Press Relations and Special Events Division
UQAM Communications Service
Phone: 514 987-3000, ext. 1707
beland.maude_n@uqam.ca
twitter.com/MaudeNBeland