Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to announce L'Envers du décor (Looking Backstage), an exhibition of recent work by Montreal artist Isabelle Hayeur. After making headlines at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad with her site-specific installation Fire with Fire, Hayeur will exhibit a series of new videos and photographs for this, her first solo exhibition at the gallery.
In the gallery's main space, the artist brings together photographs from the series Dé-peindre Québec created in Québec City for the show "6* ÉMISSAIRES, Québec réinventée par la photographie actuelle," (centre VU, 2008) and Formes de monuments, a project of Vox centre de l'image contemporaine made during an exchange with L'Espace photographique Contretype de Bruxelles (2008-2009). This will be the first time these works have been shown in Montreal.
"Isabelle Hayeur throws [the monument's] unknown soldier of the conquest of the world as picture into the trenches dug by this process, whereby construction and destruction, total war and a deceptive peace are joined like the two sides of the same coin, struck in the effigy of both the sponsors and the bit players of a show that must go on at all costs, with the entire Earth as expendable backdrop. Isabelle Hayeur may just be giving us a backstage pass to modernity itself when she drives the manipulation of images to the point where this war machine is dismantled under our eyes, its inner workings no longer hidden in plain sight."
-Christian Roy, from the essay L'envers du décor (Looking Backstage) published on the occasion of the exhibition at the gallery.
In the gallery's video room, Hayeur will present two new videos, Losing Ground (2009) and Hindsight (2009). Filmed in Quartier DIX30 in Brossard, the biggest lifestyle center in Canada, Losing Ground is a critique of urban sprawl and the resulting erosion and homogenization of the countryside across the world. The video premiered at the 2009 LOOP FAIR in Barcelona and was shown during the 28è Rendez-vous du cinéma québecois in Montreal this past February. In April, it will screen at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid) as part of Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid. Hindsight (exhibited here as a world premiere) was filmed on Governors Island National Monument in the summer of 2009. This island in the middle of New York Harbor, just off the southern tip of Manhattan, has housed Dutch governors, the British military, Confederate prisoners of war, the Coast Guard and the U.S. Army.
The show runs from April 10 - June 5, 2010 with an vernissage on Saturday, April 10, from 2:30 - 5:00 pm. The artist will be in attendance. Admission is free, everyone is welcome.
---
Isabelle Hayeur was born in Montreal in 1969 and completed a BFA (1996) and an MFA (2002) at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Since the late 1990s, she has devoted herself full-time to the visual arts and is known primarily for her large digital montages, videos and site-specific installations.
Her work is situated within a critical approach to the environment and urban development. In the some 20 years she spent living in a suburb, Hayeur was confronted with the spectacle of urban sprawl and the many disappearances that come with it. Her approach is related to this experience and is nourished by environmental discourses, such as the problems of landscape planning. She is particularly interested in the feelings of alienation, uprooting and dislocation.
Hayeur's early art practice was mainly directed toward video art. From 1996 to 2001 she worked, as a founding member, with Perte de signal, a collective devoted to emerging research, creation, and distribution in media arts. The group was quick to disseminate the works of its members to most of the international video festivals, and organized several events and exhibitions. In the period 1998-2000, photography started to become more important in Hayeur's practice and she began to show her works regularly. Since then, her works have been widely exhibited across Canada, Europe and the United States. She has also showed in Mexico, Argentina and Japan. In 2001, Hayeur created her first site-specific work, which has since become her preferred art form.
For more information on Isabelle Hayeur please consult her website: www.isabelle-hayeur.com