That said, it is such an enlarged notion of \u201ccontext\u201d that offers us a particularly interesting entry to the recent exhibition Qu\u00e9bec Gold, because one of the things that exhibition sets out to do, among, admittedly, many others, is provide some sense of the situation of contemporary art in Quebec right now. The show was a group exhibition held in connection with the 400th anniversary of Quebec City and presented at two venues in Reims, France: the Palais de Tau and the Ancien Coll\u00e8ge des J\u00e9suites. Curators Andr\u00e9-Louis Par\u00e9, Jean-Michel Ross and \u00c9lisabeth Pawlowski brought together the work of seventeen artists (or artists\u2019 collectives)1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - The invited artists were: Jean-Pierre Aub\u00e9, Mathieu Beaus\u00e9jour, BGL, Sylvain Bouthillette, Cooke-Sasseville, Michel de Broin, Doyon-Rivest, J\u00e9r\u00f4me Fortin, Dominique Gaucher, Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur, Guillaume Lachapelle, Emanuelle L\u00e9onard, Yann Pocreau, Yannick Pouliot, Michael A. Robinson and \u00c8ve K. Tremblay.<\/span> <\/sup>for the exhibition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Given the range and variety of the artists\u2019 practices, the strength of much of the work selected (and, by extension, the rigour of the \u00adcollective curatorial eye) Qu\u00e9bec Gold<\/em>\u2019s serious ambitions are well served. While \u00adcorralling so much diversity, the exhibition illustrates a trio of themes that the curators suggest are prominent in contemporary Quebec art: humour, the subversion or d\u00e9tournement of signs and symbols, and ideas of \u00adterritory\u2014both real and fictional. This thematic strategy, in itself, is a kind of regulatory function, an attempt\u2014I will suggest here\u2014to contextualize. And, as this contention is central to the exhibition\u2019s focus, a discussion of the specific works and their relationship to such a framework is in order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Humour is certainly present in Qu\u00e9bec Gold<\/em>. Doyon-Rivest\u2019s poster interventions, Voici Logopagus and Gentil Logopagus, which appeared in a number of locations around Reims, abundantly (if a little glibly) spoofed the conceits of mass-media advertising. The smiling, suited and conjoined twins (they are attached, appropriately enough, at the head) that are the substance of the images are reminiscent of \u00admuppets, while\u2014being life-sized\u2014they also manage to echo the padded suits used in combat training. In the images the pair hold kittens and \u00adgesture amicably to viewers while selling nothing but their own presence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The strategy is one that pointedly empties out the communicative \u00adfunction of ads in order to foreground their formal manipulations\u2014their glossiness, their imagery, their insidious \u201cpleasantness.\u201d The posters, emptied of any \u201cpitch\u201d become perfectly articulated nonsense. In a \u00adrelated way, BGL\u2019s floor-piece of an icily white and \u201cmelted\u201d Darth Vader, titled Born Again<\/em>, manages to upend the colour-coded conventions of \u201cevil\u201d and the mythologizing pretensions of popular culture with a giggle. The example of Victoire sur la banane<\/em>, Cooke-Sasville\u2019s installation of banana peels in the courtyard of the Palais de Tau, on the other hand, deploys a broader sort of humour, lending what is essentially slapstick an absurdly stately presence. In all of these cases, humour is deployed, curiously enough, in ways that blur the boundary-defining functions of cultural codes, inverting high and low, the serious and the slight, creating a contemporary iteration of one of the very oldest functions of humour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The work of Yannick Poulliot, displayed in the Jesuit College, is an exemplary case of the curators\u2019 second theme, d\u00e9tournement. Here, the artist renders furniture in the style of the French eighteenth century, or the English Regency period, unusable. Chairs cannot be sat in because of scale, position, their attachment to another chair; canap\u00e9s are made equally impossible to access and for identical reasons. The lustrous fabrics and glossy woods are assembled so as to reprise their historical antecedents and highlight their \u201cuselessness,\u201d both in the sense of the particular d\u00e9tournement to which they have been subjected, and in a self-conscious echo of the relationship of a lack-of-utility to luxury status. Moreover, in their conjoined condition, they simultaneously suggest penetrations both violent and sexual, thereby geometrically expanding the \u201cdisplacement.\u201d For Qu\u00e9bec Gold<\/em> Mathieu Beaus\u00e9jour (one of just two artists, with Cooke-Sasville, to present new work for the event) extends his investigation into the iconographies of economic and social power by removing the state portraits from coins and isolating them in formless black backgrounds in the series Kings and Queens of Quebec. In so doing, the image is stripped of its ordinary \u201cofficial\u201d status and given an ambiguous new one, equally prominent, but rootless, paradoxically rendered more potent and more vulnerable at once, both disturbing and poetic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, an array of \u201cterritories\u201d is offered in Qu\u00e9bec Gold<\/em>. This theme may be the most pervasive under consideration, and the artists approach it in a fascinatingly eclectic manner. Consider Emmanuelle L\u00e9onard\u2019s pointed interrogation of the border between territories: those who may enter versus those who may not, the limits of personal space, the many varieties of privacy. Leonard tests all of these with shiver-inducingly direct videotape: Guardia, resgu\u00e1rdeme<\/em>. Using a camera hidden on her person the artist walked the streets of Mexico City, approaching, \u00adpassing and recording on-duty security guards. The resultant parade of faces and gazes on the screen underlines, beyond the clear boundary-function of security guards as such, the extent to which territory is defined by the presence of other people: how close we stand to them, the extent to which we interact, even soundlessly, and the way in which their sheer physical presence confirms or establishes our own corporeality. Yann Pocreau\u2019s photos pick up on something of this thread as well, focusing on the body and its occupation of space in a number of images that are both beautiful and uncomfortable-looking. Even better, they are wonderfully playful in their prodding of the deadpan, mystery-mongering treatment of the figure that seems to have become somewhat conventionalized in recent photo work. Dominique Gaucher\u2019s paintings, among them Because It\u2019s There<\/em> and Abstractionist\u2019s Struggle<\/em> (both 2006) explore territory via a different strategy. The pictures marry hyper-realist treatment to oneiric ambiance, bringing together, for example, the indoors and the outdoors, a room and a vast snow-field, the natural world and the artificial. With a particularly bravura touch, he joins incongruities and blends multiple, conflicting representations in a profound derangement of perceptual assumptions. Gaucher\u2019s paintings, in some sense, investigate territory by questioning its limits, its boundaries, and difficult questions of definition. They dissolve beginnings and endings, our ability to distinguish factuality and fictionality, and the role of the visual in all of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However effective some of the work assembled is, faced with so determined an exhibition, a viewer must ask him or herself what, for example, is the effect of choosing a thematic grid for an exhibition whose mission is\u2014at least partly\u2014to survey contemporary work as it is made in Quebec? There are other possibilities: surveying by genre, by medium, by region, et cetera. Moreover, given that a thematic grid was chosen, one might ask why\u2014for example\u2014a particular theme, such as humour, is noted as particularly Quebecois when it is equally prominent in English Canada? In Toronto, any walk down Queen Street West will uncover a plethora of witty, ironic and even slapstick works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One immediately thinks of Allyson Mitchell\u2019s Lady Sasquatch<\/em> (both \u00adhilarious and macabre, a delightful and psychoanalytically-inflected hybrid), or of how the MOCCA\u2019s exhibition of Kent Monkman\u2019s work included a presentation of the artist\u2019s persona Miss Chief Eagle Testicle. Similar examples can be found in other countries surely. Moreover, the same ubiquity marks d\u00e9tournement and notions of territory as \u00adstrategies and themes: the flow chart narratives and information maps of Mark Lombardi, or the detourned film classics of Klaus von Bruch and Ulrike Rosenbach\u2019s Thousand Kisses, or\u2014more widely-known\u2014Serrano\u2019s use of religious iconographies could be read as such.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or, on another level of inquiry, why so slender a selection of \u00adpainting, a mere two artists of the seventeen, when so many Quebec painters are producing startlingly strong work. And what is the viewer to make of the absence of people of colour from the exhibition given the \u00adincreasingly multi-cultural makeup of Quebec? Or unambiguously \u201cqueer\u201d art, \u00adregardless of the actual orientations of any of the exhibiting artists? As one approaches the work and wrestles with it, an endless progression of other possibilities arises… one wants to say unbidden, but they are, in fact, very much bidden. They are evoked by the show itself, it\u2019s striking work and sheer deliberateness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, I do not, let me be clear on this, raise these questions here in any desire to suggest what the show should have been (obviously a show can, and should, be whatever its curators and artists determine) nor to suggest any critical or curatorial failing in the show, quite the contrary. The \u00adasking of such questions is the best proof of Qu\u00e9bec Gold<\/em>\u2019s \u00adprofound vitality.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - For example, one might have asked similar questions of the much-ballyhooed Triennale qu\u00e9b\u00e9coise<\/em> at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain, which included a number of artists that overlap with Qu\u00e9bec Gold<\/em>. However, in the case of the Triennial, the sheer size of the show and the \u201cnon-theme\u201d guiding it make the show feel a little too sprawling and unfocussed.<\/span> (Though one could argue they underline some problems entirely \u00adextrinsic to the exhibition, notably the impact the globalization of \u00adacademic \u00addiscourses and the art market is having on local specificity, not to say \u00adidiosyncrasy.) These questions arise because Qu\u00e9bec Gold \u00adsucceeds on its own terms. No show could ever be more than \u201ca\u201d (as opposed to \u201cthe\u201d) picture of contemporary art in a particular time and place… and one is unlikely to wish that it could be. The offering of any single picture obliges, in the finest dialectical fashion, the viewer to imagine others. A survey exhibition\u2014any survey exhibition\u2014works to precisely the degree it requires such questioning. It is effective to the extent to which it creates a condition of necessary interrogability. And that, one should underline, is a very great virtue. After all, the asking of difficult questions is one of the things good art is supposed to do.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_AC05_Dube_Gaucher_BaseCamp-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_AC05_Dube_Gaucher_Struggle.jpg\")
Base Camp 2<\/em>, 2006; Abstractionist\u2019s Struggle<\/em>, 2006.
Photos: Pierre Charrier \u00a9 Dominique Gaucher, courtesy of the artist & Douglas Udell Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_AC05_Dube_Grandmaison_Double-Brouillard-scaled.jpg\")
Double brouillard<\/em>, 2007.
Photo: courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n