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25/3/2004

Two exhibitions

The Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa

Sylvain Cousineau: Coq-a-l'ane

Curator Francois Dion

Sylvain Cousineau's photographic images bring us into the point of encounter between what we see and how we experience it subconsciously. At first glance, the photographs display many of the idioms of the documentary tradition, but all insist on that which is already in the process of becoming something else: they reveal the instability of our assumptions, transposing them into a different order of things, a counter-order.

Though equally fascinated by extraordinary events and ordinary people, Cousineau is far from a humanitarian or social photographer, and farther still from the kind of ''open'' work that invites completely free interpretation. First, his images are situated within the context of contemporary art; second, his practice is further delimited by the artist himself and his personal experience, inflected by ''generational'' history. The images are supremely subjective. Despite long periods spent in Ottawa, Montreal and France, Cousineau's gaze retains traces of the regional Quebec heritage that has shaped the singularity of his expression, his critical judgment, his sense of humour, and perhaps even his artistic path.

The photographer's personal history not only informs his visual record of transformations in the past 60 years: in a contradictory twist, it also finds expression in a certain fondness for regional ''traits'' speech patterns, anecdotes, characters. Cousineau is especially interested in cultural phenomena that are peripheral, that exist outside major urban centres and circles of cognoscenti. Elements of timeshifting, repetition, displacement and reversal are also important elements in his work.

The current exhibition, Coq-à-l'âne, features photographic work from the late 1960s to the early 1980s as well as more recent work. It also includes two paintings among the photographs, in order to underline the correspondence between the two practices and to remind the viewer that Cousineau has always been both a painter and a photographer. Beyond the evident visual correlations—polka-dot motifs, boats and cakes, staged nudes—the paintings and photographs alike are full of narrative twists, wordplay and double meaning. They are imbued with the artist's unique spontaneity that remains his strongest weapon against the frustrating restrictions of a world based on assumptions and determinism.

Events:
Walkthrough with Artist Sylvain Cousineau and Guest Curator François Dion
Friday 26 March at NOON

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Eric Walker: Here and Gone

Curator Renee Baert in collaboration with Aoife MacNamara

Ottawa artist Eric Walker is known for the graphic, painted, mixed-media constructions that he has produced over a career spanning some 20 years, depicting trains, ships, cityscapes, railway lands, telecommunication platforms and other icons of Canadian transport, telecommunications and industry.

Here and Gone highlights several features of Walker's paintings, including his critical engagement with the material culture and iconography of industrial modernism; a conceptual allegiance to, and dialogue with, artistic modernism; and an aesthetic vocabulary centered on collage, the material processes of making, and a documentary impulse allied with painting's illusionistic powers.

While his work depicts specific objects-in-the-world, his subject matter is more to be found in the political and social history of landscape and its uses, implied through his attention to signifiers of the economic forces that occupy and traverse space and place.

A further feature of his work is his articulation of spatial culture through specific histories. As critic and co-curator Aoife MacNamara observes, ''Walker's work is structured around a refusal to engage with universal—or universalizing—practices of representation. The works in this exhibition, although referencing broad-reaching ideas about topography, industrialization and representation are, like all of his work, rooted in specific places and are informed by actual historical, intellectual and political histories. All work in this exhibition draws on the folklore, spatial organization, labour and cultural histories which have, together, shaped the physical and intellectual landscape of the Maritime provinces. The ambition of Walker's intellectual and creative programme is disciplined by the grounding of the works in the events, people, histories and geography of specific places.''

Here and Gone features painted constructions depicting vehicles of transit and transport and the fixed sites such as ports and rail yards where they arrive, remain, connect, depart. These trains, freighters and rail yards convey, as MacNamare notes, ''the transient links and exchanges that modes of transportation enable between communities, cultures and economies.'' The exhibition title not only references these aspects of transit and transaction between locales but also suggests the abiding presence in our culture and imagination of residual relics of the industrial modes of a previous century, relative to the virtual and information economies that prevail today.

Events:
Co-curator Aoife McNamara talks about Eric Walker's work
Saturday 27 March at 2 pm

Image: Eric Walker, Halifax Peninsula and Railway Lands

The Ottawa Art Gallery
Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6E2 Canada

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