Gabor Szilasi/Chun Hua Catherine Dong | Two looks at Charlevoix

Montreal artists Gabor Szilasi and Chun Hua Catherine Dong share the poster for an exhibition of photographs at the Musée de Charlevoix, in La Malbaie. Two complementary views on the Charlevoix region. One, from 1970, on its population. The other, from 2021, on his landscapes. Two approaches to documentation and contemplation.

Eric Clement
The Press

(La Malbaie) Dedicated to history and popular art, the Charlevoix Museum was surveyed by Claude Goulet, the guardian angel of the Rencontres internationales de la photographie in Gaspésie, to create one of his photographic missions there. In order to document the local landscape. Obviously, this took, at the same time, a return to Gabor Szilasi’s wanderings in the region in 1970, with his images that had become emblematic.

In order for this documentation to be also rooted in the present, a jury has chosen to add Gabor Szilasi’s corpus to the vision of young Montreal photographer Chun Hua Catherine Dong, a performance artist who uses her body as a visual territory in her approach that touches on topics such as immigration, race and gender.

Since 2015, she regularly performs in public spaces as part of her project I Have Been There for which she stretches out on the ground, barefoot and covered with an embroidered silk down like the shroud that covers the bodies of the deceased in her hometown, China. She was invited to extend this corpus in Charlevoix during a ten-day residency at the museum.

The exhibit includes images of I Have Been There made all over the planet, the 1970 photographs of Gabor Szilasi printed on silver with Alain Lefort and the stagings produced in Charlevoix in August-September 2021 by Chun Hua Catherine Dong with the collaboration of three local photographers, Michel Antoine Castonguay, Donald Lavoie and Lucie Couillard, the museum curator who managed the entire project.

15 countries, 33 cities and 250 sites

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, with its insertion in the landscape, evokes its attachment to its origins at the same time as a certain communion with the land on which it extends. Since 2015, she has made such interventions in 15 countries, 33 cities and 250 sites. “The experience in Charlevoix was quite different from that in New York,” she says. In New York, I had had some concerns before realizing it, because we were in the middle of the pandemic, and there was still hostility towards East Asian communities. But it went well […].

Large photos by Gabor Szilasi adorn the picture rails. “We did them on film with contact sheets made from enlarged negatives,” he says. Alain developed them in my darkroom. It’s a nice result. They are mounted on cardboard, without glass, so without reflections. » Images of other Gabor Szilasi corpuses are shown in the form of a slide show. And a 15-minute video allows you to appreciate the work done in the darkroom.

Back to basics

Gabor Szilasi really liked this collaboration with Chun Hua Catherine Dong. “I really like what she does,” he said. His performance is interesting. She chose the landscapes of Charlevoix well. For him, it’s also a return to a region that brings back so many memories. Eleven years after having exhibited some forty photos there at the Cité d’art de Cap-à-l’Aigle, a former church converted into an artistic center and located between La Malbaie and Saint-Fidèle.

Charlevoix photographic mission: Gabor Szilasi 1970 — Chun Hua Catherine Dong 2021at the Charlevoix Museum, until April 30