MOLIOR 15 years - Opening reception for the exhibition Rhythms of the Imagination, Technological Tools and Works on November 9 at 5:30

 Montreal, Novembre 8, 2016 — As part of its 15-year anniversary, Molior, a digital art exhibition producer, presents the exhibition Rhythms of the Imagination, Technological Tools and Works to be held from November 10 to 19 at the Black Box of Concordia University. The opening reception will take place on November 9 at 5:30 PM. The exhibition will display works by the artists Ingrid Bachmann, Luc Courchesne, Jean Dubois, Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Diane Landry and David Rokeby.

« I called upon a selection of artists previously featured by the organization to put together an exhibition that explores the development and appropriation of digital tools. At first filled with promise, the use of technology by artists is nowadays well established.

In accordance with Molior’s mandate since its foundation, the selection focuses on works in which technology contributes to the sensorial experience of viewers, all the while allowing them to decode a world that is increasingly modulated by technological developments. The works gathered provide a glimpse of the wide variety of practices supported by Molior up until now. They mark different periods in the development of the organization, and a majority of them were shown as part of events produced by Molior all around the world. At this turning point, both in the evolution of digital art and the history of Molior, it is important to assess the situation and prepare for the future.

By way of the selected works’ exhibition and acquisition history, the exhibition also provides concrete examples to stimulate discussions in view of the upcoming colloquium Contemporary Digital Art: Conservation, Dissemination and Market Access that will take place from November 23 to 25, 2016 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. »

- Marie Perrault

Jean Dubois presents the work Syntonie (2001). This interactive video unfolds on a touch-screen interface that facilitates an encounter between a viewer and a character. In Syntonie, the gestures trigger a narrative interaction that is not limited to an encounter brought about by the touch-screen interface, since it prompts the protagonist to make inviting gestures and expose some parts of his body in a game of erotic allusions.

Likewise taking an interest in the body, Ingrid Bachmann shows Family (Anxious State) (2009). By way of a mechanism, the artist here animates a set of used shoes that begin to move in reaction to the viewer’s movements, thus creating an equally strange sound ambiance, but they more directly evoke the role of the individual in a group and the at times ambiguous ties linking members of the same family.

The work Stressato: Samouraï Serpents (2010) by Jean-Pierre Gauthier is part of a similar viewer-activated sound register. The recourse to movement introduces new behaviours into the material world and endows matter and ordinarily immobile things with a dynamism, thereby associating them with living things. The work has a disquieting character and embodies both the promises and threats that are often attributed to digital technology and tools.

On an entirely different note, as in Chevalier de la résignation infinie (2009) presented by Molior in 2011, Mandala Naya of the series Le déclin bleu (2002) by Diane Landry creates a play of shadows and lights that induces a state of meditative contemplation. The artwork stimulates reflection on our everyday life, the place that the machine plays in it and our routines, as well as on the reduction of personal satisfaction to consumerism.

Molior’s various projects have also addressed the issue of our surroundings’ computerization. Luc Courchesne’s Sublimations: Homme-Femme (2014), refers to this media environment. Between an LCD screen suspended from the ceiling and another one placed on the floor, plastic disks reflect coloured swarms of changing images of men and women.

Machine for Taking Time (2007) by David Rokeby has an evident meditative character that is buttressed by the fade-in-fade-out of images, randomly selected in databases built up with the input of two cameras respectively scanning Montreal towards the east and the west. This reference to natural cycles evokes a different timeframe, one that is inscribed in the constancy of duration and is the opposite of mass communication’s media effervescence that the ambition to grasp everything from the originary device represents.

Furthermore, as an introduction to the colloquium, organized as part of Molior’s 15th anniversary celebrations, exploring the specificities of disseminating contemporary digital art, the exhibition and acquisition history of the works constitutes a concrete of example of their singular path.

These events will be an opportunity for the Montreal community to celebrate the organization’s sustained involvement in the arts field over these 15 years, and to underline its visionary contribution to the international blossoming of Canadian and Quebecois digital art.

Molior would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Fondation Langlois as well as its partners, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Hexagram, Concordia and the Goethe-Institut for their support of the event, Musée national des beaux arts du Québec and XPND Capital for loaning their works

Molior is an organization supported by Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts and Conseil des Arts de Montréal.