Ways of Thinking is designed for anyone interested in exploring contemporary art and its exhibition framework. This section offers succinct and synthesized information on the exhibition’s concept, the artists and the works featured. One finds a general presentation, areas of inquiry and ideas to reflect upon as well as suggested Internet links and bibliographic references that allow one to gain a general understanding of the artist’s approach to artmaking, the works featured and the curatorial framing adopted. Ways of Thinking’s primary objective is to draw the public into the Gallery so that it can experience first hand the work in the exhibition and gain insight into the issues at work in contemporary exhibition making. Once the exhibition is over, Ways of Thinking becomes part of a documentation database of particular interest to students, teachers and researchers interested in the Gallery’s exhibition program.
CUT
GERVAIS, MIGONE, ROBERT
A production of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Curator: Michèle Thériault
CUT brings together three Québec artists working in installation, sound and performance around the notion and the act of “cutting.” Raymond Gervais, Christof Migone and Jocelyn Robert each present a new installation. Gervais contrasts sound and silence, darkness and light, Migone explores the idea of interstitial time and space, while Robert investigates the muteness of the image and the sonic qualities of silence.
CURATOR’S COMMENTS
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. Cuts, interruptions, suppressions, stops, divisions, resistance, penetrations, links, juxtapositions, re-formulations: a set of rhythmic activities around which a work comes to be, achieves sense or a 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.
Approached 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.
Michèle Thériault, Curator.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
THÉRIAULT, Michèle, CUT. Gervais, Migone, Robert, Montréal, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2006.
Artists
Raymond Gervais
Christof Migone
Jocelyn Robert
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RAYMOND GERVAIS
For over 30 years, Raymond Gervais has created performances, concerts and installations that bring the world of music and literature into play. He has been principally interested in the motifs of the record, the turntable and the CD case as ways of exploring notions of sound, silence and time. He is also the author of numerous articles on the history of music and the visual arts.
WORKS
Je suis venue pour écouter / I Have Come to Listen, 2006.
Extracts from Samuel Beckett’s short radio play Esquisse radiophonique (1961) as well as from his own translation Rough for Radio (1961) appear on the cover of CD cases grouped together on the wall. Displayed in total darkness, the installation can only be discovered partially, with the use of a flashlight.
Raymond Gervais, Je suis venue pour écouter / I have come to listen, 2006, installation with CD cases, paper, text and flashlights (detail).
Photo: R.-M. Tremblay, 2006.
Via Marconi, 1998.
The work Via Marconi is comprised of two photographs. One of them depicts one of the telegraph machine invented by the Italian, Gugliemo Marconi. This photograph has in its upper part a cutout space; a section of the image having been taken out. The removed part, which shows the metal sheet used in transmitting a telegraphic message comprises the second photo.
Raymond Gervais, Via Marconi, 1998, photographic installation.
Photo: R.-M. Tremblay, 2006.
EXPLORE
By experiencing these works you can explore:
- The relationship between sight and hearing, the gaze and sound, light and darkness.
- Strategies of appropriating work, of the words and objects of other creators. Working with quotation.
- Building art out of fragments. The impossibility of seeing the entire work at once makes a cut, a breaking off of the vision.
- Ideas of transmitting, capturing, imprinting, recording.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- Despite their silence, Raymond Gervais’ installations evoke sound. How are sound and the visual related in your opinion?
- Raymond Gervais feeds off other artist’s work. He breaks it down, fragments and reassembles it to make it his own and to give it new meaning. What effects does this fragmentation and appropriation have?
- The installation Je suis venue pour écouter / I Have Come to Listen requires active participation of the viewer, who must use a tool to experience the work. Does the spectator take part in the “creation“ of the work in this way ? How does handling the flashlight change our reception of the installation ?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
BOULANGER, Chantal, Raymond Gervais: le regard musicien, Joliette, Musée d’art de Joliette, 1999.
PARÉ, André-Louis, « Sculpter l’imaginaire. Un entretien avec Raymond Gervais », Espace, nº 58, Winter, 2001-2002, pp. 7-15.
THÉRIAULT, Michèle, CUT. Gervais, Migone, Robert, Montréal, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2006.
CHRISTOF MIGONE
A multi-disciplinary artist, Christof Migone explores sound, the body and their interrelations through a variety of media such as radio, video, sound recording, performance and installation. From the beginning of the ‘90s, Migone has organized several sound art and radiophonic events. He has produced six solo CD’s and his sonic works are found on numerous compilations. He also runs his own record label, squintfuckerpress. Christof Migone is the Visiting Curator of Contemporary Art at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery for 2007-2008.
WORKS
Interval, 2006.
Interval consists of 14 sound pieces broadcast through 14 amplifiers spread out in the main gallery space. Each amplifier lets us hear a different person repeat his or her age for a period of time corresponding to it in minutes (for example: a child of ten repeats the word “ten” for ten minutes.) The soundtracks have been modified with an alternation of silences. 14 drawings bring together a tight grouping of markings each one corresponding to a repetition by one specific individual.
Christof Migone, Interval (version 2006), installation with amplifiers and drawings.
Photo: R.-M. Tremblay 2006
Pastime, 2006.
Two videos presented on monitors side-by-side re-present the same repetitive activity explored in the work Interval. The artist has modified the videotapes by intervening on the speed at which the images unfold.
Christof Migone, Pastime (20 - 60) and Pastime (27 - 57), (version 2006), videos in loop on LCD screen, sound. Photo R.-M. Tremblay 2006.
EXPLORE
By experiencing these works you can explore:
- Ideas of sequence, repetition and the interval.
- Relationships and dialogue between soundtracks and their visual representation in drawing and video.
- The different deliveries and rhythms adopted by the subjects repeating their ages.
- Age as a measure of time, of space and as a vector of duration.
- The use and manipulation of multiple media (drawings, sound recording, video) to explore the same issue, to take stock of the same activity.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- Consider the creative process behind Christof Migone’s installations. How does age become a temporal and spatial indicator? How does the act of repetition work on notions of time and space?
- How does our initial perception of a particular age colour our reception of the soundtracks? Of the drawings? Of the videos?
- The modifications made to the soundtracks and videos by the artist alters the original act of repetition thus creating new sequences and new intervals in the gallery space? What effect do these reworkings have?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
LABELLE, Brandon and Achim WOLLSCHEID (eds.), Christof Migone. Sound
Voice Perform, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Errant Bodies Press, 2005.
THÉRIAULT, Michèle, CUT. Gervais, Migone, Robert, Montréal, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2006.
www.christofmigone.com
JOCELYN ROBERT
Jocelyn Robert’s work is characterized by the use of new technologies. Sound and computer manipulations are combined to create installations, performances and video works that poetically interrogate the relationships between visual art and technology. Jocelyn Robert plays with software and programming in order to make sound visible and to make images audible. He collaborates frequently on collective projects, and has composed and recorded several audio CD’s as well as publishing numerous critical and theoretical texts in various magazines.
WORKS
L’Origine des espèces, 2006.
L’Origine des espèces is a sound and photographic installation exploring the ideas of silence and white noise. A digital image of a 1930’s Silent model typewriter, is read by an audio file a translation thus occuring not only of the image into sound but of sound into image. The sounds are distributed through 50 speakers displayed to in the same formation as a typewriter keyboard.
Jocelyn Robert, L’origine des espèces, 2006, installation with photography and speakers. Photo R.-M. Tremblay, 2006.
In memoriam Joseph Grand, 2005.
Jocelyn Robert presents his book In Memoriam Joseph Grand, (Le Quartenier, Montréal, 2005) to the public. The preface recounts how Jocelyn Robert came to discover the famous “incomplete” manuscript of Joseph Grand, a character in Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague. Robert pays posthumous homage to him in publishing the complete manuscript.
Jocelyn Robert, In Memoriam Joseph Grand, 2005, Le Quartanier, Montréal.
Photo R.-M. Tremblay, 2006.
EXPLORE
By experiencing these works you can explore:
- Ideas of silence, white noise and ambient sound.
- The relationship between image and sound. The process of transforming image into sound.
- The complexity of the apparatus versus the starkness and subtlety of the effect.
- Notions of truth and the manipulation of historical and novelistic facts.
- Work with the sentence and the deconstruction of language.
- Reflection on the manufactured object (book) and the found object (manuscript).
A FEW QUESTIONS
- In your opinion, can images evoke or produce sound? How?
- L’Origine des espèces makes us conscious of the materiality and weight of silence. Do you pay attention to the white noise (ventilation, fountains, computers, etc.) in the silence that surrounds you? How do these sounds change your relationship to silence?
- Is silence a sound for you?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
DÉRY, Louise, Jocelyn Robert: L’inclinaison du regard, Montréal, Galerie de l’UQAM, 2005.
THÉRIAULT, Michèle, CUT. Gervais, Migone, Robert, Montréal, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2006.
www.lenomdelachose.com
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