CUT GERVAIS, MIGONE, ROBERT Curator: Michèle Thériault

Raymond Gervais, Je suis venue pour écouter / I have come to listen, 2006, installation with CD cases, paper, text and flashlight (detail). Photo: R.-M. Tremblay.

Through the installations of Raymond Gervais, Christof Migone and Jocelyn Robert, this exhibition reflects upon the CUT that occurs, in a ‘thousand ways’, in a work and in its conception. Cuttings, interruptions, suppressions, stops, divisions, resistance, penetrations, links, juxtapositions, reformulations: a set of rhythmic activities around which a work comes to be, achieves sense or non-sense. CUT evokes both the ‘shock’ that the act of cutting suggests and the multiple cuts that take place in a process such as film editing that results in a re-structuring of time and space.

Viewed from this angle the installations of Gervais, Migone and Robert reflect not only upon what is there: is seen, listened to, felt and thought; but on what is not there. On everything that has lead the artistic process to that point.

Each artist presents a new installation. In Raymond Gervais’ Je suis venue pour écouter / I have come to listen, 2006, an installation that combines sound and silence, darkness and light, Fessenden (the father of the first radio broadcast) and Samuel Beckett, the viewer, flashlight in hand, must make his way through the darkened space of the gallery. Christof Migone explores the notion of interstitial time and space through Interval (version 2006), a multi-faceted work including sound, video and drawing. L’Origine des espèces, 2006, by Jocelyn Robert, juxtaposes a richly colored photograph with an ensemble of speakers, the muteness of the image to the sonic register of silence.

The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery‘s contemporary exhibition program is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.