The ART of Reconnection
To connect to contemporary art, we can: take a virtual tour of a contemporary art museum, search Google for the major artistic themes in current works, or log on to an artist’s Facebook Live, to see an artist in the midst of creation; we can take a seminar online, text a friend taking art history classes, listen to a podcast on the bus after work, or ask Siri about it. But why not actually connect with contemporary art? Experience it, see it, touch it, talk about it and, together, question the omnipresence of technology in our lives… This is what the 40th Symposium d’Art contemporain in Baie-Saint-Paul had proposed to do.
(re)CONNECTION
Noun
Since 1982, when the symposium was founded, technological invention has been constant, each one leaving its indelible mark on society. Indeed, that year, Time magazine’s "Man of the Year" was a computer! The first CD, the launch of the Macintosh computer, the first laser printer, chip card, microprocessor; the introduction of Windows, GPS and satellite network coverage; SEGA and other gaming consoles, digital cameras, mobile telephones, the internet and search engines, computer-generated images, DVDs, plasma screens, MP3, Blackberry, e-mail, as well as Myspace, Facebook, YouTube and now, the metaverse: in the span of 40 years, our world, even with respect to the most everyday of activities, has been irrevocably changed by technologies that are always evolving. But not without question. Lo and behold, asking questions, by way of offering different perspectives, is one of the things contemporary artists do best! Faced with a hyper-connected world, 13 artists from Quebec, elsewhere in Canada and the world, established a home base in a former school, now a museum, here in Baie-Saint-Paul. Some use technology as their tool, others use more classic mediums; with sharp eyes, they have all explored «Connecté-Interconnecté : le monde numérique en question» [Connected-Interconnected: Questioning the Digital World] as a theme, inviting us to meet them where they are, in the very real world of their studios, for Baie-Saint-Paul’s Symposium d’art contemporain [Contemporary Art Symposium]. The Symposium took place under the artistic direction of Anne Beauchemin, art historian, sessional instructor at Université Laval, and independent curator, and the honorary chairmanship of one of Quebec’s digital art pioneers, artist Luc Courchesne.
While we await the 41st edition of the symposium, whose already-announced theme will be « Qui est « je »? Qui est « nous »? », [Who am I? Who Are We?] we give you an intimate look, in words and pictures at the work done this year by each of the 13 artists who have explored the question of connection for this highly anticipated and well-known annual event, presented by the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul.
Irene Anton
(Berlin)
An industrial designer, a designer of fashion and textiles, and an artist specializing in public art, Irene Anton questions the consequences of globalization, in particular, “fast fashion” which encourages overconsumption, to the detriment of workers’ human rights. With used hosiery, she creates structures resembling the inside of the human brain that evoke connection, the internet, and social media. Will it bring out the best in us (openness, gathering, and empathy) or the worst (cybercrime, intimidation, and power struggles)? This past August, Irene designed the installation/network stretched between the walls of the room that became her Baie-Saint-Paul studio in the Pavillon Jacques Saint-Gelais Tremblay building.
Michel Boulanger
(Montréal et L’Islet)
Holding Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in the plastic arts, Michel Boulanger began his artistic career in 1985 attending his first event, Baie-Saint-Paul’s first symposium, the Symposium de la jeune peinture au Canada [Young Painters of Canada Symposium]. Since that time, he has taught and practised the arts, concentrating on the questions of landscape, industrialization, and reality. In his practice, he uses drawing, asserting it as an independent art, and looked at in the broader sense, down to its use in his sculptures and installations that translate various kinds of 3D models into real space. In his designated studio space at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, using tree branches as his material, he built a shape that seems to have come right out of industrial computer-assisted drawing (CAD) software, with the objective of establishing a tension between the organic and the digital.
Marilyne Busque-Dubois
(Baie-Saint-Paul)
A poet, author, and visual artist who makes prints and installations, Marilyne Busque-Dubois uses words as her main medium of expression, and these can be found in all of her creations, along with relationships to nature, the territory, and the environment. Co-founder of the Centre de production en art actuel Les Ateliers [centre for the production of contemporary art] and resident of Baie-Saint-Paul, Marilyne established her symposium studio in la glacière [the ice house] a building in the middle of the Domaine Forget de Charlevoix’s sculpture garden, as part of a new partnership between that institution and the Symposium. Photos, testimonials, haiku, a structure covered with fabric and stones express the interconnectedness between untamed nature and inner feelings.
Serge Clément
(Montréal)
At times poetic, at times full of questions, studied, or bewildering: This is photography, through Serge Clément’s eyes. In multiple forms (installations, documentaries, stories or essays) this Montreal-based artist’s photographic art travelled from France to Hong Kong before settling in Baie-Saint-Paul last summer, in time for the symposium. Going deeper into the concept of networks, digging into cinematographic memory and cinematic rules, comparing silvered images to digital images; these are the questions raised by Serge Clément’s « Écrans & Réseaux 2.0 » [Screens and Networks 2.0] work presented in his studio at the Pavillon Jacques Saint-Gelais Tremblay.
Hédy Gobaa
(Montréal)
A Tunisian raised and educated in France, Hédy exhibited and worked in both countries before packing his suitcases and bringing his brushes to Montreal, almost 10 years ago. He has since obtained a PhD in artistic practice from UQAM. His painted canvasses offer views of opposing Eastern and Western political and social contexts. For the project at the Baie-St-Paul Symposium d’art contemporain, using the computer, Hédy Gobaa creates photomontages of items and features from both Quebec and Tunisia which he assembles to then project onto canvas to create hyper-realistic, hybrid images of landscapes and reference points. A statement about globalization, immigration, and about how difficult it is to really see a place (whether adopted, of birth, or simply when travelling) for what it is, intrinsically, without imposing our own culture or views, which act like a distorting filter that can erase or superimpose various things from or onto that place.
Sébastien Lafleur
(Montréal)
A multidisciplinary artist, Sébastien Lafleur brings together a variety of techniques and materials, some organic and some digital, to create immersive installations. He is interested in the impacts of the virtual and the application of home automation (smart home, remote control, etc.) on the real world and nature. Simultaneously aesthetic and experimental, the spaces that Sébastien offers us to live in and explore are composed of sculptures, video installations, lighting, drawing and soundscapes controlled and changed by touch and motion sensors. In this way, visitors to his studio space at the Pavilion Jacques Saint-Gelais Tremblay building were able, through their presence and their gestures, to become part of the artist’s work before their very eyes, in real time.
Chantal Lagacé
(Sherbrooke)
Over the course of 35 years of artistic practice, Chantal Lagacé’s career has included a number of exhibitions in Quebec and in France, of public artworks (under policies incorporating art into architecture), active involvement in her cultural community, and even the founding of an artist’s collective and centre. With the meticulousness and patience of a paleontologist or archivist, Chantal has created an installation in Baie-Saint-Paul that recreates the city itself, using maps and aerial photography: its roads, buildings, electrical wires, and cables… In so doing, she highlights the Symposium location’s own networks. The Plan Ligne Point work is thus in line intellectually with the rest of her work: objects, buildings, and the city itself as witnesses to an identity, a memory, an era, a culture, a social and economic class, a digital and technological transformation…
Sylvie Laplante
(Montréal)
From the outset, Sylvie Laplante’s work was rooted in her education in design and theatre, before she turned towards the visual and technological arts, a practice that led her to exhibit her work in Switzerland and Spain, as well as Germany. She is currently completing a Master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM. A multidisciplinary artist, Sylvie takes us along on her commutes and walks by way of her sound, video, photographic, painted or cartographic works. She is particularly interested in the medium of sound and its power to evoke, the stories it brings up, and its omnipresence in cities and in nature, for walkers who listen for it. In her Symposium studio, she creates and plays back recordings gathered from different geographical locations in the city. By the variety of ways she assembles and modulates these recordings, she wants the visitor to experience a sound story, and to describe what they imagined and what they felt.
Patricia Lortie
(Calgary)
Educated in industrial design and business administration, and originally from Quebec (Arvida), Patricia’s life took a very different turn in 1995, when she settled in Calgary and studied at the Alberta University of the Arts. Today, she plays an important role as a woman artist in Western Canada. Certainly inspired by the larger-than-life territory of this area, she is interested in the symbiotic relationship between human beings and the natural world. Despite our tendency as a society to set aside this connection to our environment, Patricia is confident that what ultimately brings us all together is our belonging to and dependence on the natural world. This is what she reminded us of, when she came to Baie-Saint-Paul with an installation wherein she sculpted corrugated cardboard to make it look like trees again, sculptures she combined with a video projection. We were encouraged to hug a “tree,” reconnect with nature and, in this way, led to question our relationship to overconsumption and its impact on forests.
Carolyne Scenna
(Montréal)
A contemporary Montreal artist who holds a graduate degree in visual and media arts, Carolyn Scenna is very active and widely exhibited. Her work is sensitive to questions of hyperconnection and today’s digital revolution. With works that push the boundaries between the everyday and the strange, she offers a poetic, documentarian approach in which multiple meanings leave room for interpretation. At the Symposium in August, and in front of live audiences, Carolyne created stop-motion videos in her mini studio, echoing the “ASMR” videos now popular on the internet. Huge papier-mâché hands crushing over-ripe peaches, for example. This exhibit's only goal was to delight the senses… These scenes were paired with experimental digital animation to create perplexing, entertaining videos in line with the artist’s process and aesthetic.
Oli Sorenson
(Montréal)
From Los Angeles originally, this artist, who now lives in Montreal, was first recognized in London, where he participated in a number of digital art events, followed by events in Germany, Finland, Switzerland, and Slovenia. Working in a number of artistic mediums, including NFTs, Oli Sorenson’s influences are many and various. Just as a DJ remixes music, this artist defines his practice as “remix art,” picking up the vocabulary of internationally known artists and updating it in his works, using different themes and different mediums. Cloud, the work Sorenson created at the Symposium (its title a reference to the digital storage space we’re all familiar with) immediately established his position with respect to virtual art objects, which, like the cloud, are meant to be insubstantial and intangible but which, at the same time, have a concrete environmental and financial impact, for example. Both acrylics and NFTs containing rows of pixellated, fluorescent icons, juxtaposed with one another, create the visual effect of the final work.
SYLLAD
Sylvie Rochette Et Ladislas Kadyszewski
(Sherbrooke)
A sculptor trained at Concordia and included in the Dictionnaire historique de la sculpture québécoise au XXe siècle [Historical Dictionary of 20th-Century Quebec Sculpture], and a Frenchman who settled in Quebec in 1992, trained in photography: Sylvie and Ladislas have been an artistic duo (SYLLAD) for 20 years; their shared subject is the tree. The tree as the ultimate symbol of connection to the earth, interconnection with other living organisms and balance, according to popularizer of science Michel Leboeuf’s theory. In comparison to the tree as a symbol, as human beings, we need to ask ourselves: “Have we gone too far with technology?” And “Have we let technology weaken us?” With the Baie-Saint-Paul component of their TRANS-HUMANCE work, the two artists pursue these questions on the premise that trees are looking at us and saying to themselves: “Poor humans… they’re totally disconnected!” This work consists of sculptures made of tree branches gathered in situ connected by fibre optics, as well as citizen action to identify trees that are meaningful to the city.
Vasilis Vasili
(Nouvelle-Écosse)
Originally from Albania and educated in Athens, Vasilis first settled in the United States, then in Canada. A speaker and sculptor, his work is known and exhibited in Europe, in North America, and Asia. Vasili’s geometric, modern rock sculptures are not free of feeling; on the contrary… using shapes and perspective, he addresses the concepts of restriction, entrapment, escape, partition, and separation. He often works with the theme of fear. It’s this theme that he explores at Baie-Saint-Paul using the shapes of his sculptural works that call to mind the transition from ancient guard towers to today’s surveillance camera: when fear leads to methods of self-protection so intrusive that they become aggressive. Confronted with digital cameras that track us wherever we go, the theme of this year’s Symposium calls to mind a sub-theme: “What about the right to disconnect?”
The research work and questions asked by the artists present at the 40th edition of the Symposium d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, allowed for discovery, gathering, connection (and reconnection) to critical thought regarding the digital transformation of increasingly numerous aspects of our lives, and that is contemporary art’s greatest role:
To provoke, to question, to observe, to shake up thinking, and to challenge the status quo!
