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5/2/2014

Adrian Paci / Collage

Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal MACM, Montreal

Adrian Paci
Lives in transit

Curator Marie Fraser

Albanian-born artist Adrian Paci, currently based in Milan, enjoys a growing international reputation. This exhibition, co-produced with the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris, comprises paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and videos that investigate socio-political issues such as collective history and personal identity under conditions of migration.

Adrian Paci’s art acts in response to the historical, political and cultural transformation that emerged out of the upheavals experienced in Eastern Europe. Starting from his own experience, and that of his family and friends, Paci addresses such issues as exile, identity, memory and collective history, in a way that is both moving and straightforward.

This inaugural Canadian exhibition devoted to the Albanian-born artist offers a selection of works produced since the late 1990s, including Albanian Stories, 1997, his very first video, in which we see his three-year-old daughter telling her dolls fairytales that mix up fictional characters from her stories with soldiers and members of the international intervention forces. Paci applies the same intensity to staging and filming various rituals: his own funeral wake in Vajtojca, 2002, a bride-to-be’s final moments with her family in Last Gestures, 2009, or people by the hundreds lining up to shake his hand outside the church of San Bartolomeo in Sicily in The Encounter, 2011. Reaching well beyond his personal experience as an exile, Paci’s works seek to create a space where opposites come together: the real and the fictional, tangible and political, conflictual and fabulous. One example of this is the video The Column, produced specifically for the exhibition, which originates from an incredible story. Paci learned that it might be possible to have a marble sculpture made on board a “factory boat” as it sailed from China to Europe. The video captures the fascinating images of this sea voyage on which five Chinese craftsmen are busily carving the marble.

Adrian Paci was born in 1969 in Shkodër, Albania. He lives and works in Milan. Paci represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and has taken part in numerous group shows since then: at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2005, Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, in 2000, Tate Modern, London, in 2008, and MAXXI, Rome, and the Lyon and Havana biennials, in 2011. He has been featured in solo exhibitions at a number of museums: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Kunstverein, Hannover, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Bloomberg Space, London, and Kunsthaus, Zurich.

Adrian Paci. Lives in Transit is a co-production of the Jeu de Paume, Paris, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan. It received support from Québec’s Ministère des Relations internationales, de la Francophonie et du Commerce extérieur and France’s Ministère des Affaires étrangères (Consulate General of France, Québec City) in connection with the 64th session of the Commission permanente de la coopération franco-québécoise.

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Collage

Collage is one of the few artistic practices that navigate freely between what we have termed high and low art or, more radically, between art and craft. Collage feeds off the plethora of images contemporary society produces, appropriates its detritus, absorbs anything and everything into its visual field. It deals with ephemera, offering new meaning through recontextualization. Like hip hop, sampling and mash-up, collage utilizes a juxtaposition of existing fragments from disparate unknown sources and, perhaps more than any other artistic medium, reflects a desire to harvest the chaos of the everyday without neutralizing its potential. Tending to flourish in times of conflict and social change, collage provides artists with a way to engage with the issues of the day in a direct, easily readable form. It is a medium that embraces contradiction and multiplicity, is infused with political, often activist motivations, and so may be considered an ethical gesture.

The present exhibition brings together the work of eight artists who employ techniques of collage (as well as decoupage and montage) to very different ends and evoke distinct historical traditions. Montréal painter David Elliott’s large-scale canvas Chutes, 2007, takes the form of a theatrical space into which bits and pieces of found popular imagery are depicted in disjunctive scales so as to produce a Surrealist image. Luanne Martineau’s large paper work The Lack of It the Dream, 2013, is a whirlwind of patterns combined with recognizable imagery (crystals and gems, fake fingernails and fragmented body forms, statuary and headdresses), creating a highly complex visual field. Known primarily as a painter, Louis-Philippe Côté has been making collages since he was a teenager, and the thirty paper works entitled Data, 1996-2013, clearly draw on the tradition of photomontage by Dadaist artists such as Georg Groz and Hannah Hoch. The at times shocking confrontation of imagery from newspapers and magazines explicitly reflects the bombardment of images we are subjected to every day, particularly the prevalence of representations of the female body. Strictly speaking, Hajra Waheed and Paul Butler’s very different works are decoupages rather than collages. Waheed’s A Short Film from Sea Change: Character 1: In the Rough, 2013, is a highly evocative and cinematographic narrative of one man’s journey of discovery, in the form of a collage of 300 negative glass slides and postcards from the 1930s and 1940s. The decidedly more abstract collages by Paul Butler, in which all the textual information in Artforum ads has been deleted, may be read as commentary on the wealth of meta-textual information contained in the extensive pages given over to commercial interests in art magazines. His The Collage Party Pavilion (v2), 2011, installed in La Rotonde, provides visitors with a forum to create their own collages. Thomas Corriveau’s 16-mm film Kidnappé, 1984-1988, constitutes a rather succinct summary of the multiple ways collage techniques may be used, including, as it does, stop-motion animations of perspectival anamorphoses made from cutouts from magazines, as well as montages of staged photographs. And finally, Trevor Mahovsky and Rhonda Weppler’s sculpture Prop, 2007, demonstrates the elastic nature of what may be termed a collage.

Image: Adrian Paci, Home to go, 2001 Plaster, marble dust, tiles, rope. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Press contact:
Valérie Sirard t. 514 847-6234 valerie.sirard@macm.org
Wanda Palma, t +514 8476232 wanda.palma@macm.org

Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal MACM
185 Sainte-Catherine Ouest (corner Jeanne-Mance) - Montréal (Québec)
Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday: from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Wednesday: from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Monday closed
Friday Nocturnes
The first Friday of every month from 5 to 9 p.m.
Regular admission rate.
No Nocturnes are scheduled in January and August.
Admission:
$12 adults
$10 seniors (aged 60 and over)
$8 students (aged 30 and under with valid I.D.)
$24 families (maximum 4 persons including at least 1 adult)
Free admission for children aged 12 and under and members of the Musée Foundation
Free admission every Wednesday evening from 5 to 9 p.m.

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