The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery presents Raymond Gervais 3 x 1, a comprehensive retrospective dedicated to this major figure on the Quebec contemporary art scene from the 1970s to the present. Developed over a period of four years by the curator Nicole Gingras, Raymond Gervais 3 x 1 is conceived as a single exhibition presented in two locations. For the first segment, the Ellen Gallery features solo works produced between 1975 and 2001. In Fall 2002, Vox, Contemporary Image Centre will exhibit works made between 1980 and 2012. This partitioning highlights the numerous recurrences and reverberations—poetic motifs inherent to Gervais’ thinking and creative process—between the wide array of artworks and archival documents that make up Raymond Gervais 3 x 1.

Raymond Gervais’ richly varied oeuvre encompasses photographs, texts, sculptures, installations, and performances revolving around the theme of the aural imagination—a way of conceptualizing sound and listening. This ongoing fascination is manifest in the exhibited works in Raymond Gervais 3 x 1. They build on the artist’s profound knowledge of a wide range of musical traditions—from classical to jazz to the avant-garde, as well as the many iconic aspects of its material culture: musical instruments, album covers, record players, tape recorders, cassettes, CDs…. Notably, in these explorations, Gervais increasingly works less with sound per se and more with silence, weaving text, image, and object together in installation pieces where sound is often evoked rather than present.

Tracing Gervais’ engagement with avant-garde sound and music scenes as well as performance and conceptual art practices over three decades, Raymond Gervais 3 x 1 is the most significant exhibition dedicated to this Montreal artist to date. It will be accompanied by the launch of a 200-page publication including numerous reproductions of artworks and documents as well as essays by Raymond Gervais and Nicole Gingras. The artist recounts his beginnings as a musician, and his discovery of the avant-garde in music and the visual arts, while Gingras, who has a deep interest in sound art practices, explores the notion of the aural imagination in Gervais’ oeuvre.

This exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.