9-13 février 2006
ARCO’06, the International Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain
New Territories: Cityscapes: Jérôme Fortin + Alexandre Castonguay
Selected by David Liss, directeur du Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA)
Following the presentation at Art Forum Berlin 2005 and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Jérôme Fortin will be unveiling two new screens of folded paper and Alexandre Castonguay will be presenting Portapak: an interactive touch screen installation at ARCO’06. This thematic presentation offers new ways of looking at a cityscape either conceptually or metaphorically.
At ARCO’06, Alexandre Castonguay will present Portapak, a long video pan captured from a train leaving Ottawa and arriving in the heart of Montreal. An embedded touch screen enables the viewer to determine its speed and direction. Accompanying this work will be some large digitally-edited photographs from his "Constructions" series. These digitally-edited images consist of more than 250 photographs that create a 360 degree view on a two dimensional surface of urban landscapes like a building under construction in Montreal and a late 19th Century observatory in the middle of a manicured landscape in the heart of Ottawa.
Following the success at ARCO’05 where Fortin in situ Seascapes sculptures were feature in the press and on TV, he will present a new sculpture constructed from everyday objects. Fortin’s works resemble 16th-century curiosity cabinets that displayed exotic finds for the delight of collectors and the curious of yore. Jérôme Fortin’s method is to repeatedly rework a category of objects such as telephone lines, books and plastic bottles, so that the transformed object reflects its original industrial character in multiple variants. Jérôme Fortin will also present two new works from his newest series Screens that he created for the group show “L’envers des apparences” at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal last Summer. These large installations are created with simple sheets of printed paper taken from comic books that he cuts end-to-end and glues onto a panel. He creates variations on motifs which, by it patterns and sheer size, recall movie screens and monitors, where the basic unit pixels are revealed in an estranged way.
