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Exibitions 1986

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Diana Gubbay
From January 11th 1986 to February 8th 1986
Investigation de l'arche

Resident of New York for the past 8 years, Diana Dubbay has explored the iconographic potential of architectural structures, using sculpture, installations, and drawings. In order to enhance the iconographic dimension, she reduced architectural form to their fondamental elements, isolating them from their usual contexts and functions, and translating them into scales and materials that bring out their esthetic character. Architectural motifs are chosen for the richness of the symbolic, philosophical, or social content that underpins them. Diana Gubbay's work focussed initially on structures as diverse as the log cabin and the skyscraper. Next, she concentrated more specifically on the house, rich in associations of hearth, shelter, and security; as well as the column constituting an elegant solution to the functional problem of supporting weight.

Recently, it has been the arch that Diana Gubbay has chosen as the focus of her investigations. The arch, typical symbol of classical architecture, carries a multitude of cultural and symbolic references: separation, passage, theshold into another state, another place. It is this most recent arches series that will be exhibited at Optica.

Three groups of work are presented. First is a group of small-scale sculptures, made of flexible materials such as electric wires, thin metal sheets, narrow cooper tubing, etc. The fragility of these materials highlights the interaction of symbolic theme and variations that Diana Gubbay plays out through the form of the arch. Here and there one recognizes references to the history of the form, from the most majestic of its manifestations, to the most prosaic garden bower. One notes also contrasts provoked by the use of materials that evoke much more pargmatic, down to earth realities.

The second group is a series of maquettes of different sizes, including one very large-scale construction using heavy industrial cardboard. Although these maquettes are complete in themselves, they also constitute studies for possible development in more permanent materials such as wood or aluminium. The exhibition includes thirdly a series of gestural ink drawings that incorporate a more playful, abstracted exploration of the arch theme. An anthropomorphic sense emerges from the drawings that confronts the architectural with the human form. I link of continuity and passage is thus established between an organic dimension beneath the surface of architecture, and the architectural dimension that is intrinsic to the human body. The gestural vitality that here expresses human motion, brings us back to the core of the investigation that Diana Gubbay takes in hand in the growing body of her work.
- Press release (Optica)

Bibliographie
Mills, James, "Exhibition at Galerie Optica: Diana Gubbay explores arches in sculpture ink" in The Westmount Examiner, Thursday January 9, 1986, page 14.




Pierre Fournier
From February 15th 1986 to March 15th 1986
Les machines sensibles

In primitive times, the "man-object" link was seen as a means of understanding and of holding the world in one's grasp through the symbolic strength of the objects were seen as having a life of their own.

The Chaman, a primitive artist, was responsible, because of his knowledge of philosophy and things spiritual and scientific for linking the incomprehensible to sociological reality. My work is nostalgically inspired by this period when the object had mythical meaning.The story of an obscure human myth.
- Pierre Fournier, 1984.

Bibliographie
Daigneault, Gilles, «Exposition», Le Devoir, samedi 1er mars 1986 p, 28




Blake Fitzpatrick
From March 22nd 1986 to April 19th 1986
Research Photographs

"Industrial sponsorship and direction of the university-based scientific research sucessfully shifted the burden of some significant costs, and risks of modern industry from the private to the public sector. But this was not all. Perhaps more importantly, it redefined the form and content of scientific research itself... This reorientation affected what kinds of questions would be asked, which problems would be investigated, what sorts of solutions would be sought, what conclusions would be drawn."
- David F. Noble
- America B Design

Bibliographie
Wollheim, Peter, "Administered Anonymity", C Magazine, #11, 1986, p. 90-91.




Lorne Greenberg
From March 22nd 1986 to April 19th 1986
Photographies

The following document is only available in French:
"À l'été 85, j'ai découvert dans la collection de Douglas Sander, à Vancouver, une sélection d'affiche politique. Je fus immédiatement attiré par les affiches venant de Chine et d'Amérique Centrale. Cet intérêt était de plus amplifié par des études antérieures en sciences politiques et en relations internationales ainsi que par des voyages dans ces régions.

En décembre 85, je retournais à Tucson (Arizona) pour y passer l'hiver. Je m'y intéressais aux murals hispaniques dont certaines m'étaient connues tandis que j'en découvrais d'autres par hasard. L'intention politique originale y était transformée en une observation de signes et d'images historiques, mythiques, illusoires ou réalistes. Les traces individuelles y étaient plus précises et plus généralisées que dans la propagande des nations et de leurs adversaires.

Si les affiches chinoises glorifient les réalisations révolutionnaires, la dignité humaine et l'évolution constante de la société, celles d'Amérique Centrale n'avaient aucune victoire révolutionnaire à célébrer (sauf Cuba) et représentaient seulement leurs héros et martyrs. Les affiches du Guatémala et du Salvador utilisent la nature comme pivot central tandis que les murales hispaniques reprennent les traits caractéristiques des villes situées à la frontière mexicaine.

La juxtaposition et la superposition d'images m'ont permis de créer, de façon à la fois intentionnelle et accidentelle, des photos fonctionnant soit au niveau politique, soit au niveau esthétique quelques fois une connotation humoristique ou ironique d'autres fois encore comme des dessins ou des peintures."
- Lorne Greenberg
- Press release (Optica)

Bibliographie
Wollheim, Peter, "Administered Anonymity", C Magazine, #11, 1986, p. 90-91.




Vicky Marshall, Medrie MacPhee, Carol Wainio, Shirley Wiitasalo
From April 26th 1986 to May 24th 1986
City Detour

"Optica Gallery has assembled four well-known Canadian women painters who are using the canvas in new ways. Their energies are not directed towards visual representation, visual abstraction, or minimalism. They are using the picture plane of their canvas as a space to represent internal dialogues about multiplicity of sensory perceptions and cognitive impressions of the late 1980's.

Perhaps most intriguing are the productions of Carol Wainio. They are dialogues between types of systems, "between History and history, between private and public space, between Nature and Culture, between conscious and unconscious"—all woven into a network of balanced tensions. Rather than revealing "truths" , Wainio reveals the invalidity of distinctions established between systems. In particular, her painting "Structures of Memory", 1986, aligns figures that are in states of transition due to a world which is full of discordant realities. There are figures that live in recentily extince past: the poetry of the real world of the street, open space, and buildings. Other figures clutch microphones and wires: they accept the electronic environment of mass media and computers as the true reality of present and future. They accept the superimposing of new rationale over what has gone before. This is truly the sensory dilemma for the young adult of the late twentientch century.

The three other painters, Shierly Wiitasalo, Vicky Marshall, and Medrie MacPhee also submit interesting new conjunctions concerning realignments of perceptual and emotional worlds. Their visual space is their language for their internal dialogues. "

Reinblatt, Melanie, "Optica's new Women", in Montreal Mirror, May 1986, vol. 1, # 17 page: 18.

Bibliographie
Daigneault, Gilles, « Expositions » in Le Devoir, Samedi 17 mai 1986, page c-11.
Dumont, Jean, « Un printemps qui s'installe », Montréal ce Mois-ci, mai 1986, pages 24-26.
Reinblatt, Melanie, "Optica's new Women", Montreal Mirror, May 1986, vol. 1, # 17, p. 18.




David Hlynsky
From May 31st 1986 to June 28th 1986
Likeness and Artifact

"Flesh is not stone... A likeness should describe what the subject was like...alive, complex and transitory." – D.H.

An important dimension of the works Hlynsky exhibits here is a preoccupation for the living. "Likeness", a series of portraits of friends and acquaintances from the artistic community, is a 'snapshot-hunt'. Fractions of seconds immortalizing ephemeral gestures and traces of alive defy death.

In "Artifact", the second series of photos, the relation with the living is more subjective: the objects are considered as cultural artifacts of our times, with both a personal and social value. For Hlynsky, the aim of this focus on mundane objects is to shake our numbness to the physical world surrounding us and to renew our perception of the details and their direct implications.

This collection of objects can also be considered as a sort of archeology or the present time, as well as the ephemeral – a juxtaposition, in a way, of an immediate relation to the subject and a distant one. We find the same attitude in the series of portraits Hlynsky made of the people he considers among the best minds of the contemporary artistic scene. "With homage to their genius, I hunt their likeness..." ... We then remember that Hlynsky is also an editor.

David Hlynsky is, perhaps, best known as founder and director of the Fringe Research Holographic Inc. studio, devoted to the development of holography as a fine art, and as editor and publisher of Image Nation magazine, a periodical devoted to the publication of experimental and fine art photography: activities in which he worked actively for 10 years. Yet, since 1982-83, he decided to concentrate his energies on his painting, photographic and screen writing works, maintaining his engagement as president of the Toronto Photographer's workshop.
- Press release (Optica)



Charlie Murphy
From May 31st 1986 to June 28th 1986
Toronto 1985

*This exhibition is dedicated to Michael Brennan.

All of Murphy’s assemblage-paintings exhibited here originate from photographs taken in Toronto in 1985. The titles speak for themselves: Sidewalk, City gardener, Café Bistro, MacDonald’s, He ran..., Yonge Street, Parade, August 10, 11 a.m., Quiet city, Sunday, and Good-bye Toronto, Hello Cape Breton. Murphy’s photographic style has evolved from the snapshot tradition following Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson and, especially, Robert Frank who has most strongly influenced him. But the photograph itself is only the first step of this work. As he said himself in 1983: “These works show how my watching became doing”.

The assemblage-paintings of “Toronto – 1985” integrate entire series of photographs juxtaposing them against a painted surface. The combination is particular in the way that preserves the clear independence of the diverse materials. Photographs, painting, and other objects are strictly dissociated from each other. Likewise, the titles, often placed on the very surface of the painting, function specifically as a narrative component. In each painting, the photographs also used as narrative elements unfold around an anecdotal thematic. This theme is, itself, articulated at a second level as a larger narrative.
- Press release (Optica)

Charlie Murphy was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia. A self taught photographer, he first received recognition working with and under the direction of Robert Frank in 1976. It is at that time that he began to integrate collage, painting and drawing in his works, discovering only later the affinities of his methods with those of Schwitters and Rauschenberg. Since that time, he developed his composite works in many directions: diptychs juxtaposing collages and photography (as in My Mother was an American – 1982), photographs of photographic assemblage (as Venizia 1979), integration of texts in many different ways, and of painting in photography (Aunt Wawi in my mother’s kitchen and others in 1984) or photography in painting (this actual series), etc.



Céline Baril
From August 13th 1986 to August 30th 1986
La bête noire

"La Bête Noire" is the continuation of a series of installations (Le Septieme Jour et Qui Perd Gagne) which do not depend on a particular style or mode of expression but rather rely on a consistent mood and spirit. A with the earlier pieces, she «La Bête Noire» is composed of an interveaving of intrigues and associations which articulate and express a chassé-croisé of concepts and materials, of history and History.

"La Bête Noire" is the site of a confrontation between photography, film, television and sculpture. The preponderant medium is photography; however, there photographic-images originate in the late night movies seen on my TV...they belong to us all and their composition is not my own.

To photographic movies involves questionning the limits of the frame, a notion which clearly distinguishes one medium from the other. In film when a character moves out of the frame, he continues to exist. Photography negates this sense of continuity: it arrests. To photograph movies on TV implies unsettling the components of the image and entails revealing the remoteness of its origins.

"La Bête Noire" is made up of ten sculptures conceived around and with these frozen images; the void between the objects is filled with words. Those words function as titles and actively participate in the piece because of their narrative potential. "La Bête Noire" stars (cinéma oblige): Apprenticeship, Doubt, Memory, Desire, Wrath, Vertigo, Identity, Exoticism and of course L'Amour Toujours L'Amour.

"La Bête Noire" is black. Each of the objects is covered with a thick layer of tar which pave the roads of my history.

"La Bête Noire" is neither scientific, theoretical nor methodical, she simply displays certain constants.

"La Bête Noire" aspires to completeness, yet she will forever remain unsatisfied because she is desire; devouring all that crosses her path and perpetually demanding more.
- Press release (Optica)

Bibliographie
Bérard, Serge , « Céline Baril », Vie des Arts, déc. 86, Hiver, # 125, p. 58.
Daigneault, Gilles, « Exposition », Le Devoir, samedi 23 août 1986, p. C-8.
Falk, Lorne, « Céline Baril, La Bête Noire » C Magazine, #12, 1987, p. 76-77.
Johnstone, Lesley, « Céline Baril, Optica et Arc », Vanguard, décembre 1986 à janvier, 87, p. 29-30.
Lepage, Jocelyne, « Le rouge et le Noir de Céline Baril », La Presse , septembre 1986.
St-Pierre, Gaston, « Céline Baril, Optica », Parachute, # 45, Hiver (déc. jan. fév) 1986-1987.




Thomas Corriveau
From September 6th 1986 to September 27th 1986
Prénoms

In art, the dismemberment of deformation of a body may be the result of an act of love, however, the dismembering act may also conceal other and stranger motives. Often as not, if a history of the divided up bodily figure in art were be done, depicting the trend towards cutting up anatomies and rearranging selected limbs into often monstrous (sometimes “improved”) forms, it would certainly reveal that, in some instances, these expression stem from rather murky feelings.

The quest for the ideal body, because it presupposes the need for established rules, also participates in the dismemberment of the body. Through this quest the fantasized body becomes a sum of strange parts, a mixture of delirium, excessive reason and wilful need to keep the “other” at a distance. This holding at a distance, where both quest and rejection blend together, is not necessarily synonymous of contempt, though no doubt this sentiment is frequently present. Art is quite familiar and has long subscribed to the quest for the ideal body. This pursuit has now, however, been taken over by advertising.

The recent collages of Thomas Corriveau are constructed from pictures that he cuts out of fashion magazines. From these pictures, Corriveau selects only certain parts of the body, which he then cuts to fit the requirements of the image he is fabricating. Of the original bodies – which had already been fabricated through carefully studied lighting, perspective and make-up – there will finally only subsist some limbs or parts of limbs and anatomy: faces, legs, fingers, lips, etc. Corriveau then works out, arranges and orders together the whole, with the help of paint and along certain structural, mostly anamorphic principles.

What results is a surface that, at first glance, is rather disconcerting (shocking?); a surface that the unaccustomed eye perceives, in the best circumstances, as a grotesque representation and, in the worst, as veritable slaughter. However, gradually, the observer will see an image form, most often a face also inspired by the fashion picture. Hence, the initial illusion (to make believe) is contradicted. For how is it possible to believe (and what is there to believe) when the recognition of the mechanism of illusion accompanies or even precedes the emergence of the image itself? The perception of this new image requires time and also that the body adopts a particular point of view. The relationship imposed is therefore uncomfortable and difficult. Though the features seem to follow advertising norms, the faces never really seem to conform; and the mechanism, once identified, reappears continuously. It therefore becomes impossible not to be aware of the artist’s manipulations whether in the glued pieces of paper or the dabs of paint. Nothing can be taken for granted in this new image; an image that otherwise, on the page of a magazine, would have revealed itself to be rather pleasant and unproblematic.
- Pierre Landry (translated by Daniel Fitzgerald)
- Press release (Optica)

Bibliographie
Daigneault, Gilles, « Les regards obliques de Thomas Corriveau », Le Devoir, samedi 13 septembre 1986, p. D-10.
Lepage, Jocelyne, « Corriveau, Bougie et Roy, jamais deux sans trois », La Presse, samedi 20 septembre 1986, p. F-1.
Lupien, Jocelyne, « Thomas Corriveau, Optica », Parachute, déc.-jan.-fév. 1986-1987, # 45, p. 27-28.
Payant, René, « Leçon d'Anamorphose », Spirale, #65, nov. 86, p. 16.
Vie Des Arts, décembre 1986, # 125, p. 42.




Marc Chaimowicz
From October 4th 1986 to October 25th 1986
Liaison

In 1985, Marc Chaimowicz published a book entitled Café du rêve at the Éditions du Regard/Galerie de France, Paris. Café du rêve gathers together letters and writings, advertisings images, postal cards and photographs, and drawings from fabric design. The chapters: “le Désert”, “le Parc”, “North Africa Song”, “Partial Eclipse (a performance)”, “Chorus (a letter from Vienna)”, “Liaison”, and “le Sélect...”, assume a diary or log form, reflecting the singular itinerary of this artist’s concerns over the last 15 years. Questions of personal identity, the quotidian experience, conflicts between the individual’s needs and desires when confronted with the requirements of the social world, and of presence and absence of the artist in front of his audience, etc... provide the underlying structure to this fragmented narrative.

Chaimowicz, a British artist who is internationally known, has performed and exhibited his installations in major European cities. The evolution of his work is marked by two significant periods. From 1974 to 1979, all Chaimowicz’s works revolved around his personal home space, which was adopted as an idealized refuge against the external world, and as a place for the quiet domesticity propitious to the quest of the self and creativity. This was the Approach Road period characterized by an intense interest in rooms and closed spaces. This period gave rise to the realization of an important photographic series, which has been continually re-used in his later works.

From this, Chaimowicz produced his first book: Dream, an anecdote (Nigel Greenwood Ed., London, England, 1977) in which he first demonstrated an interest in the interrelationship of image and text. This research was continued in Here and There (1978), further developed with Partial Eclipse (1980), finally achieving a finer realization with Café du rêve.

After 1979, and with his departure from Approach Road, Chaimowicz’s works investigated an interaction between his intimate universe and the external world, more and more taking on the character of journeys. Partial Eclipse, which had been shown in Montreal in 1980 at the conference “Performance and multidisciplinarity: postmodernism” organized by Parachute, clearly marks this evolution. With regard to the renewed importance given to the text, it would seem that Partial Eclipse constituted a prelude for Café du rêve.

The realization of Café du rêve has been spread over a 4 year period, punctuated by exhibitions of the original pages from some chapters in the book. Similarly, Optica will present the chapter “Liaison” of Café du rêve and a recent series of drawings of 1986. Chaimowicz will also give an illustrated reading of Café du rêve at Optica the October 10th at 8:00 p.m.
- Press release (Optica)

Bibliographie
Dumont, Jean, « L'art du temps et le temps de l'art », Montréal ce mois-ci, Octobre 1986, p.16, 18.




Randy Saharuni
From November 1st 1986 to November 22nd 1986
Humeur vitrée

Is the image fixed on the film through the “vitreous humor” of the camera more credible than the ones which were fixed on Saharuni’s retina when he was a student? Difficult question to answer with certainty, especially as the results of artist’s new experiments appear to be so paradoxical.

As a pupil, Saharuni experienced disarray confronting the gap between science’s certainties and his own concrete observations. Then, in an effort to limit his incomprehension of nature’s laws, he chose to auscultate the process of rationalization underlying the scientific pursuit. By using grids or diagrams, legends, observed isolated data, ambient blackness as annihilation of contextual references, and reinforcing this “mise en scène” of scientificity with the titles such as Technical analysis, Descartes Dilemma, Big Bang Small Universe, Saharuni’s current exhibit “Vitreous Humor” assumes indeed the character of a scientific investigation. Yet the objects under investigation appear to be quite parodic: ping-pong balls, Styrofoam flakes, mousetraps, paper-airplanes, and crackers, screws propelled by an air balloon... They force a smile from the viewer; even though the scientific dimension of these images remain more serious than it can appear at first.

Chaim Tannenbaum, examining Saharuni’s work in 1982 fount in it a poetic equivalent to twentieth century science’s re-examination of previous mathematical and logical certainties. Heisenberg’s work had presumed that velocity and location of an object are determinable in only an inverse proportional way. “It is precisely this post-Heisenbergian unclear reality which Mr. Saharuni’s photographs reveal.” Indeed it is a question of movement here: something is balancing, falling or bursting, leaving a luminous trace hardly identifiable except in those moments simultaneously. Is this a paradoxical demonstration of Heisenberg’s theories? A simple confrontation with the signs of exact sciences’ certainties? Or ultimately a simple artistic commentary? One thing is sure: despite a certain contiguity with real the photographic experience does not, after all, appear more convincing, or less problematic, for a definition of the real, than the retinal experience.

What remains is perhaps the image of an artist-scientist, similar to da Vinci; with, this time, an intershocking of the artistic and scientific experiences. We imagine with humour the scientist-artist, one-man-band: one hand throwing the paper airplanes while pressing the shutter with the other, and then setting off the flash; all this after setting in motion the mouse-trap’s wire frame. Finally, what we have is a parodic way to introduce some quite fundamental questions: Is art a means towards knowledge and apprehension of the world? Is science too an intuitive and hypothetical expression?
- Press release (Optica)

Bibliographie
Simon, Cheryl, « One Against the Other », C Magazine, # 13, mars 87, p. 56-57.
Photo Sélection, novembre 1986, p. 61.




Cheryl Sourkes
From November 1st 1986 to November 22nd 1986
Révéler l'économie du psychique

Perhaps we can read this series of Sourkes’ photographs as a long visual metaphor for our actual relationship to representation. Bombarded on all sides by knowledge and information, our conscience builds itself with the accumulation and juxtaposition of multiple little narratives, only coherent as part of a personal mythology.

The entirety of Sourkes’ photograms, detaching themselves from a black background, can this be seen as a kind of constellation: arbitrary heap of knowledge, similar to the figures projected unto the sky by the Ancients (Scorpio, Gemini, Virgo...). From fragments of texts and images, more or less contextualized but always significant or evocative, that she has taken from books or photographed in the street, Cheryl Sourkes creates narrative figures, little stories, by which she reveals her personal relationship to the actual world, her own mythology. Some titles give an idea of the extent of her investigation: The inner organism of an idiom, The dispersed narratives of our lives, Roses will be blooming in dark gardens we abandoned long ago, Our images are our keepers, Arago phenomenon (looking with the eye to the side), Basic issues in the philosophy of time, Subway...

However, the series remains highly fragmented. Their circumstantial gathering for exhibition possesses some arbitrariness. Each time, only a part is shown: the entire series including in fact 85 photographs, realized from 1984 to 86. Totality is forever inaccessible. The groupings of these diverse fragments remain themselves parcellized, permutable and disappearing. What remains is the intention and the trajectory of the conscience, which are animated fundamentally by an assemblage of values, knowledges and pulsions organized only around organized only around a personalized logic.

However Sourkes; own intention would probably be located on a somewhat different level: not in relation with knowledge but more in a global relation to life and consciousness. From a “difference lost and retrieved” to an “opening up of the psychic economy”, the intention would have been modified and focalized. And this new accentuation would be apparent in the interstices between the photographic fragments, there, where the exterior edges of negatives let their traces, there, where they are superposing in a certain confusion, there, where the artist scratches the surfaces, there, where the blackness is so full, there, where texts and images, and the title of photographs, and the title of the exhibition, play of all their tensions... In these interstices would appear this capacity of overture and renewing that Cheryl Sourkes used herself in her presentation of her works: this psychic economy centred around the living forces of the unconscious, the depths of experience, the resources of disorder, and the life intensity in confrontation with the depth or the other...

Thus she would succeed, designating this invisible and unutterable, to send us back to ourselves, to our own mythology, our own apprehension of the world.
- Press release (Optica)

Bibliographie
Dumont, Jean, « Expositions, Images qui disent, mots qui montrent... », Montréal ce mois-ci, novembre 1986, p. 14 et 16.
Simon, Cheryl, « One Against the Other », C Magazine, # 13, mars 87, p. 56-57.
Dikeakos, Christos, "Cheryl Sourkes, Vancouver east cultural centre, Vancouver", Vanguard. Feb 1985.




Mark Adair
From November 29th 1986 to December 20th 1986
Toronto Bank Robbery, Twister, Helen and the Choker

In April 85, the sculptor Mark Adair exhibited two important pieces in Toronto. These two works however were quite dissimilar, as much as in structure, as in content and medium. Toronto Bank Robbery (1984) borrows the form of the Stations of the Cross: a wood carved series accompanied with texts in the staging of a bank robbery. Whereas Twister (1985) is a large wall piece made of plaster depicting, in profound relief, a tornado overhanging a landscape, both urban and rural. These are the two works to be presented at Optica, together with a new piece, Helen and the Choker (1986), made of two small scenes, also in wood relief with texts, but used in a more poetical and allegorical purpose.

Seen in relation to the first two pieces, this one reveals and reinforces the underlying coherence of Adair’s previous works. Helen and the Choker incorporates both the opposition between scared and profane, that is effective in Toronto Bank Robbery, and the opposition between humanity and nature prevalent in Twister. Putting the human figure ‘in suspension’ between the earth and the sky, literally and metaphorically, Helen and the Choker introduces us to what can be considered as a kind of cosmology. In this way, the three pieces can thus be seen, to a certain extent, as questioning the relationship of the human being with the world and the universe, from the multiple points of view of the social, the natural, the sacred and even the metaphysical. This preoccupation appears in the representation of passion and veneration, as in Toronto Bank Robbery (1), the one of the confrontation with the uncontrolled forces of nature, as in Twister (1), or, more generally, the one of human conduct, as in Helen and the Choker...

The structure of the materials appears strongly coherent as well, even if Twister seems at first very different with its huge format and its absence of text and narrative. This piece seems to mark a hesitation in the sculptural research, a partial return to earlier preoccupations. In fact it also participates in the projection of the pictorial image in three-dimensional space, or rather in the exploration of this intermediary zone, which goes from the low-relief to the small scene where the space deepens and the figures clearly detach themselves from the background. This is especially apparent if we know that Twister was accompanied with many similar works, of smaller format, hung on the wall in “open boxes”...
- Press release (Optica)
- (1) cf Parachute 41, Winter 85, Vanguard, Fall 85, and the Globe & Mail, April 12th, 85