In close-up, above the escalators that carry the thousands of daily metro passengers, a man and a woman hug each other. Yet they are two strangers to each other. Between them, a small shutter activated the camera, just when the embrace was pressing enough.
This photo of Alana Riley, like many other works of art, is part of the route established by Zoom Art, in and around the Montmorency metro station, in Laval. Born in the midst of a pandemic, when museums were closed, Zoom Art has made it its mission to bring art into public places. The theme of this third edition, Be togetheralso refers to the pandemic, as to how it has deprived us of social contact, and also forced to live crammed on top of each other.
sudden intimacy
Also, the sudden intimacy between two beings, evoked in the works of Alana Riley, returns in the photos of Caroline Hayeur, who photographed her models while they slept in their beds.
These are panels generally devoted to advertising space which are thus occupied by artists, until October 16. We will therefore find these works both in the metro and on bus shelters, or even perched high up, on signs offered to the view of motorists.
Some works had to radically change form from their initial format. This is the case ofOrdeal noh 1, a canvas painted by Rafael Sottolichio in 2013, which originally measured approximately five by seven inches, and is now reproduced in 12 by 16 feet. laugh. It’s a sign planted in the middle of a parking lot with a mall behind it. And the colors burst”, says the artist.
It is the intimacy of his own family that the artist has reproduced here, touching on the theme of the issues of immigration, his parents including Chileans of origin.
Balled up dictionaries
It was after two years of residency in New Brunswick that artist Karen Trask produced the two installations that are pictured on a bus shelter. In the first, the artist made a huge ball of thread with the pages of 50 dictionaries that had been discarded. To do this, she used the Japanese technique of shifu. The huge ball that resulted was deployed for more than five hours in the small village of Sackville, where the artist made his residency.
The presence of works of art in various places linked to public transport often brings out the greyness, even the ugliness of the places. In the Laval bus terminus, which also serves the northern crown, the works of Louise Robert, which can evoke bouquets of colorful flowers, provide a little escape in a heavy and murky universe.
Like Rafael Sottolichio, Anne-Renée Hotte sees her works mounted on a panel on Boulevard de la Concorde, offered to motorists.
His photos, which revolve around the theme of the family, are also taken from filmed installations. First inspired by the first sentence of the novel Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, “all happy families are alike”, the artist tries to show a reality behind the image. Leo Tolstoy’s famous phrase continues as follows: “but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.
Curator Geneviève Goyer-Ouimette selected the works presented. Most of these works were produced before the pandemic, but they acquire a new meaning after the collective ordeal of forced confinement and by their location in the middle of a place of passage, otherwise completely anonymous.