Illusions Are Real - The Manif d'art 10 central exhibition - The Quebec City Biennial at the MNBAQ Français
QUÉBEC CITY, Feb. 16, 2022 /CNW Telbec/ - Manif d'art 10 – The Quebec City Biennial, produced in collaboration with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), is back at last following a forced one-year hiatus. From February 19 to April 24, 2022, the MNBAQ will present the central exhibition of Manif d'art, now in its 10th year, focusing on the theme Illusions Are Real.
Both organizations are committed to the arts community and have succeeded in the heart of winter in creating genuine synergy and assembling the best contemporary art. This unique event raises the profile of Québec City, a World Heritage Site, and affords an ideal opportunity to discover distinguished contemporary artists from at home and abroad.
Guest Curator Steven Matijcio's comment on the theme chosen: Illusions Are Real
The 10th edition of the Manif d'Art Biennial extends across a multitude of venues, spaces and environments across Québec City – each one animating the core thesis, while also extending its questions and musings. Illusions are Real meditates upon the proliferating amount of artifice that inhabits our lives today, from synthetic flavours, altered photographs and viral conspiracies to political rhetoric, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, deepfakes and the concocted identities we live online. And while the history of half-truths is nearly as long as humankind itself, the acceleration, expansion and ubiquity of deception in the age of social media has led some to call this the "post-truth" era. The Manif d'Art Biennial navigates this disorienting terrain from a variety of perspectives, congregating artists from around the world who captivatingly build and break illusions to consider both the seduction and danger of this growing phenomenon.
The central exhibition of the Québec City Biennial proposed by the MNBAQ assembles the work of 21 artists who explore varied, ambiguous wonders in the form of destabilizing abstractions, physical transformations, representations of animals, spectral presences, advancing technologies, and stupefying curiosities that waver between reality and manipulation. With the sheer volume of simulation and misinformation that colonizes everyday being, illusions have an increasing level of impact on shaping our perceptions and feeding our desires. Magicians, mythical beasts, oscillating surfaces, doppelgangers and ever-changing appearances nourish our inquisitiveness and challenge our orientation, as well as how we navigate a world where real and virtual are interwoven. In this perilous, but no less engrossing arena, the artists in Illusions are Real tickle our imaginations and admonish those who are too easily lured, implicitly asking who, and how, we trust today.
When artists amuse themselves by mystifying the public
The MNBAQ has assembled 100 works by 20-odd international, Canadian, and Québec artists grouped together by Steven Matijcio under a fascinating, mysterious, topical theme. Among the noteworthy artists exhibited in the Pierre Lassonde Pavilion, mention should be made of Pierre Huyghe (France), Gillian Wearing (England), Titus Kaphar (United States), Gabriel Lester (Netherlands), Tauba Auerbach (United States), Tony Tasset (United States), Nicolas Baier (Canada), Michel de Broin (Canada), Brian Jungen (Canada), Karine Payette (Canada), Annie Baillargeon (Canada) and Karen Tam (Canada).
The assembled works will afford visitors unforgettable experiences, ranging from the art of wonder that is at once ambivalent, fascinating, and disturbing, to the seemingly innocuous illusions that inundate our daily lives. The interplay of the Illusions Are Real exhibition has never been as thrilling.
Through a unique circuit in the temporary exhibition rooms of the Pierre Lassonde Pavilion, the public's pleasure will be twofold since in addition to marvelling at the fascinating works, visitors can discover artists whose artistic approaches are truly remarkable.
Seminal works from abroad
Seminal works include French artist Pierre Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't, which proposes a cinematographic amalgamation in which reality and its reconstitution become indistinguishable. Images of an Antarctic expedition overlap images of a concert on the Central Park skating rink. At the boundary of the documentary, his film examines the distinctions between fiction and reality under a title that gives the impression that nothing of the sort ever happened.
American artist Tony Tasset dissects the American dream and its many mirages. He recovers emblematic images from the mass media and produces striking caricatures. Snowman with Coke Can Mouth and Broom is a doctored imitation of the snowman, an iconic popular art form.
Dancer and Heavy Halter by Sascha Braunig, a Canadian artist who lives and works in the United States, is also noteworthy. The artist amuses herself with luminosity in a sensorial approach to painting. The hollowed-out silhouettes in her works, reduced to thin luminous frameworks, appear to participate in an almost carnal game of hide-and-seek on the stage.
British Columbian artist Brian Jungen draws inspiration from traditions in his Dane-zaa heritage to transform mass-produced objects into whimsical sculptures. He manipulates objects by deconstructing and joining them together in such a way that they remain recognizable while ensuring that the new shapes allude to Indigenous material cultures.
Another outstanding work, American artist Tom Friedman's installation Open Black Box pushes the limits of perception and rationality by gravitating towards the fantastic. An immense cube remains partially invisible, which reflects the unconscious logic of perception that completes what is absent.
American artist Titus Kaphar masterfully produces faithful copies of historic works before cutting, crumpling, enveloping, shredding, twisting, tearing, or scribbling on them. The artist seeks to rewrite history and thus brings to light in a stunning work perspectives that the great canons of art have overlooked.
Seminal works from Québec
Data by Québec artist Nicolas Baier at first glance might pass for a big photograph of a lush spruce forest crossed by a stream. In fact, the landscape is entirely virtual, an optical illusion of disconcerting verisimilitude. The exhibition also includes the Montréal artist's first video.
In the three glass aquariums filled with translucent turquoise liquid in the work by Montréal artist Karine Payette, the constant toing and froing of a mysterious creature arouses a certain anxiety. Payette's installation À perpétuité clouds perceptions and brings visitors into contact with an unknown species that is an object of curiosity.
Salon chinois – White Gold, a new installation by Montréal artist Karen Tam, comments on the passing fad among Westerners for Chinese porcelain, also called white gold, and evokes the private living rooms formerly found in the homes of European nobility. However, the installation comprises, by way of an example, genuine artefacts and facsimiles from the MNBAQ's collection and fake decorative objects created by the artist, revealing in passing the violence to which can lead simplistic, caricatural, dehumanizing representations of the Other.
Artist Karine Fréchette, a native of Montréal, paints to fold the surface of her paintings, embedding in them an energy in which a spatial experience plays out between a psychedelic aesthetic and allusions to the screen and to the waves that surround us. Sillages 6 (Le tableau de Leipzig) is one of these outstanding paintings.
Lastly, Montrealer Maskull Lasserre infuses ordinary objects with a certain vitality by creating an illusion of mutability. In the sculpture Conscience, palpable tension emanates from a suspended steel skull subject, to our great surprise, to the invisible forces of magnetism.
Credits
The exhibition Manif d'art 10 – The Quebec City Biennial. Illusions Are Real if organized by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in collaboration with Manif d'art - The Quebec City Biennial.
Curatorship
Steven MATIJCIO
Director
Blaffer Art Museum,
Houston (Texas)
Bernard LAMARCHE
Collections Development Officer
and Curator of Contemporary
Art (2000 to present), MNBAQ
Programming Committee
Claude BÉLANGER
General and Artistic Director,
Manif d'art – The Quebec City
Biennial
Michelle DRAPEAU
Assistant Curator
Manif d'art – The Quebec City
Biennial
Steven MATIJCIO
Guest Curator
Management
Annie GAUTHIER,
Director of Exhibitions and International Relations, MNBAQ
Marie-Hélène Audet
Head of Mediation, MNBAQ
Yasmée Faucher
Head of Museography, MNBAQ
Catherine GAUMOND
Head of Collections, MNBAQ
Coordination
Bernard LAMARCHE
Design
Marie-France GRONDIN
Loïc LEFEBVRE
Designers, MNBAQ
Graphic Design
Marie-France GRONDIN
Designer, MNBAQ
The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec is a state corporation funded by the Gouvernement du Québec.
Illusions Are Real
The Manif d'art 10 central exhibition –
The Quebec City Biennial at the MNBAQ
From February 19, to April 24, 2022
SOURCE Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
418 643-2150 or 1 866 220-2150 /mnbaq.org
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