Guillaume La Brie, Jon Knowles,
Philippe Allard & Justin Duchesneau
Openings: June 14, 8pm
Darling Foundry, visual arts centre
745 Ottawa Street
Montreal, QC, H3C 1R8
Hours: Wed–Sun, 1–7pm
Thu until 10pm
T 514 392 1554
info [at] fonderiedarling.org
Guillaume La Brie
Les œuvres qui n’étaient pas là
Until September 2, 2012
Main Hall
Guillaume La Brie uses a stratagem of economy to represent two monuments of art history observing each other despite their own absence in the large industrial hall of the Darling Foundry. The outline of George Washington, placed overhead on a ledge serving as pedestal, is cut out of an organized, prefabricated pile-up of white furniture on the tall brick wall. Facing it in opposite symmetry, a totem of stylish dressers, “mass produced” in plywood and piled up on top of each other, harbour in their uniform center the cut-out of the raw shape of a Moai sculpture from Easter Island. As anachronism or a culture clash, “the invisible representative of a closed, spent world contrasts with that of an imperial world in constant expansion”, says the artist. Are these negative sculptures Guillaume La Brie’s way of responding to the Darling Foundry’s monumental emptiness?
Since 2002, Guillaume La Brie has shown his work in several exhibition spaces in Quebec, such as Skol, Circa, B-312; Clark in Montreal; and Axenéo 7 in Gatineau. He has also taken part in several group exhibitions, international residencies, and events, such as those organized by Pique-Nique.
Jon Knowles
Mixed Misuse
With the participation of Vincent Bonin
Until September 2, 2012
Small Gallery
This show marks a continuity between production and display based on a two and a half year period of engagement with the behaviourism of studio work at the Darling Foundry (strategic showroom, quasi domestic living room, artisanal shop, etc). I have formulated my studio production through an aesthetic of re-use, the repurposed and a kind of performed distress that characterizes the Darling Foundry environment.
Showing with your landlord is analogous to the idea of a renter cooking dinner for their landlord while repairing their leaky faucet. Autonomy, agency, and a gift economy are part of the equation. Needless to say, friendship can also unfold from this contingent situation. Repairing a leaky faucet or improving the state of the physical space in any way (while feeding the landlord) would incrementally improve the value of this space, for your landlord and temporarily for yourself. Renters and landlords share. We all know that the further the space (and in tern the house) is improved (while others in the neighbourhood are generally following a similar logic of improvement) the neighbourhood will also slowly rise in value along with the property. Real-estate developers and the banks are also very much implicated. Outside of this fairly modest first exchange between tenant and landlord (though this is never without social complexities and power relations), what can be made of some people interested (and seeing to it) that the neighbourhood’s value rise steadily, all without lifting a finger? What is my “petit métier” in this rendering of things?
–Jon Knowles (excerpt from the exhibition text)
Philippe Allard & Justin Duchesneau
Courte-pointe
Installation outside the Darling Foundry
Courte-Pointe (Quilt) wraps around the building of the Darling Foundry as though a passing giant had left his bed cover to dry in the sun. This cumbersome mass interferes with the building’s functionality and creates its own environment. A formless, uncanny component, is it in miniature or blown up? The people’s bed cover, pixellated out of milk boxes—these makeshift racks proliferating on Montreal’s bikes—, is on display to attract passersby under its canopy of filtered light.
This new intervention follows in the footsteps of previous collaborations between Philippe Allard and Justin Duchesneau. Working in the space between art and architecture, their collective uses strategies of accumulation of mass-produced objects.
