Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present The Debris Field, a solo exhibition of new works by Michael A. Robinson from January 5 to February 23, 2008.

“The party’s nearly over.  But the guests are going to stay.  They have no place else to go.  People who weren’t invited are beginning to arrive.  The house is a mess.  We must all get together and without saying a word clean it up.”

John Cage: cited from the essay “On the Museum’s Ruins”, by Douglas Crimp

There exists, places in the universe where nothing is formed.  Vast swaths of space where objects have not yet started to originate and where future events are waiting to occur.  While space remains the symbol par excellence of this natural occurrence, on closer inspection, examples of this phenomenon can be found everywhere.  In fact every time we move we stir up a flurry of displacements, often of the minutest order, which taken together, conspire to change the course of history. 

I believe that within contemporary art we can witness something similar happening.  Art, having at one time been poked and prodded, stretched and deformed, reduced and exploded, can no longer take refuge in it’s own past.  It has been, in some sense, destroyed.  In this way the contemporary artist is charged with the ungrateful task of cleaning up.  While there is a natural tendency to be nostalgic and ironize about the past, today’s artists must find a way to clean the slate.  What can be done now?  In this exhibition we can witness one attempt to address this situation both metaphorically and literally.

Michael A. Robinson

Isa Tousignant. "Stars are born" Hour (Montreal) 14 February 2008
Parallel exhibition, L'horizon des événements at Centre d'exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe: 19 January - 2 March 2008
Jérôme Delgado. "Premiers champs de couleur" Le Devoir (Montreal) 12 January 2008 (in French)
Lyne Crevier. "Décadence" ici (Montreal) 10 January 2008 (in French)
Christine Redfern "Winter Arts Preview: Art attack" The Mirror (Montreal) 10 January 2008
"Michael A. Robinson @ pfo" ratsdeville (web) January 2008