In the 5th century B.C., when Herodotus sought to understand the causes of the war between the Greeks and the Persians, he painted— with the help of words — a world in the shape of a skull. Such an anthropomorphic representation immediately takes us to
Réal Party, Propriétés privées Chantier Art 3 Event Ateliers Jean Brillant, Montréal Spring 2012
While Apple’s geolocation software recently “lost” two users in the middle of the Australian desert and China announced that it will begin a satellite counteroffensive, proposing an alternative to the American GPS hegemony by 2020, our everyday relationship to cartography is rapidly deteriorating and the
In this imaginary constellation, the hope for a better life, for a radical discovery of the self—since all voyages are a kind of personal conversion—are associated with the existence, somewhere, of a rare, special place, at which one must arrive [
Restoring artworks—in this case, sculpture—is painstaking and complex work. Some are exterior installations, set up in public space; others are in the collections of museums, corporations or individuals, while others are part of the imposing corpus of our religious heritage. Whether we are dealing with
The activities of conservation professionals are traditionally based on preserving the original materials of a cultural property.1 The principle of this activity closely allies the notion of an object’s original material integrity with that of its authenticity; this is what the articles in the Dictionnaire encyclopédique
Daniel Buren’s Les deux plateaux is a work that is squarely at the core of the controversies of its era. Contested at the time it was installed in 1985, it continued to be so in 2007 when the artist addressed the question of its maintenance
Considered one of the most illustrious figures of 18th century Quebec sculpture, Pierre-Noël Levasseur (1690-1770) was born in Quebec City and was raised among a dynasty of sculptors. Without a doubt the greatest ornamentalist and sculptor in New France, he created, among others, the decor
Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.1 – Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels Endlessly amassed, the dwarves, midgets, small things, miniatures and other diminutives have yet to reach the level of his shins,
Guy Laramée, Guan Yin Galerie d'Art d'Outremont May 3—27, 2012 The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea. –Rainer Maria Rilke Art sometimes may be created through excessiveness. But how do we measure the “excessive”? How does the work make us see the refusal
An Era of the Boundless? Defining the boundless is not an easy task—actually, it is almost as dizzying to think about it as it is to experience it. One can sometimes grasp it as the infinite (literally without bounds) sometimes as excess (implying the overstepping of
Since it was uploaded last summer Jonathan Gales’ short film Megalomania 1 has aroused fascination with its protagonists, a city and its architecture portrayed as an incommensurable and immobile construction site. A truly post-humanist product, Megalomania’s unfurling of Piranesian scenes allows one to grasp the failure