Christiane Arbour "Paysage bucolique" 2019, Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist. © Christiane Arbour. All rights reserved.
Christian Barré "At2metres" 2020. Digital project involving homeless people. Courtesy the artist. © Christian Barré. All rights reserved
Stephen Connolly "Chek Lap Kok , 21.00, 01.12.19" 2019. Video. Courtesy the artist. ©Stephen Connolly. All rights reserved.
Jannick Deslauriers "Cendres II" 2020. Digital print. Courtesy the artist. ©Jannick Deslauriers. All rights reserved.
Jacques Desruisseaux "Lever du jour" 2020. Digital print. Courtesy the artist. ©Jacques Desruisseaux. All rights reserved.
Caroline Douville "PoC Man" 2020. Acrylic, airbrush and oil on canvas and plywood. Courtesy the artist. ©Caroline Douville. All rights reserved.
Dana Edmonds "Love You Needy, Even Late" 2020. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist. ©Dana Edmonds. All rights reserved.
Marco Godinho "Left to Their Own Fate (Odyssey)" 2019. Inkjet print on photo paper. Courtesy the artist. ©Marco Godinho. All rights reserved.
Trevor Gould "The Human Brain Begins" 2020. Watercolour. Courtesy the artist. ©Trevor Gould. All rights reserved.
Mo Laudi, "#RIPMoLaudi" 2020. Video (excerpt). Courtesy the artist. ©Mo laudi. All rights reserved.
kimura byol-nathalie lemoine "Distancing Ready" 2020. Digital print. Courtesy the artist. ©kimura byol-nathalie lemoine. All rights reserved.
Caroline Rochon-Gruselle "Sous le vent / Through the Wind" 2020. Collage. Courtesy the artist. ©Caroline Rochon-Gruselle. All rights reserved.
Oli Sorenson "Group of Seven Pixels (from Tom Thompson)" 2020. Digital print. Courtesy the artist. ©Oli Sorenson. All rights reserved.
« Si tout est arrêté, tout peut être remis en cause »
(If everything is stopped, everything can be called into question)
— Bruno Latour
Future_Tense :
Ways to Envision the Future
2020 (ongoing)
As we entered into a new reality since the beginning of the pandemic, many of us started wondering what the future could hold. Through a multidisciplinary body of work including paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, photographs, videos and digital works, the exhibition Future_Tense: Ways to Envision the Future presented a reflection of our world after the period of containment. It brought together the work of thirteen artists taking a critical look at the future in terms of our social relations and the way we lived in the public sphere during the pandemic. We asked the artists: How is this changing our relationships to ourselves, to others and to our environment, and what impact will the pandemic have on our psychological behaviours and physical well-being?
List of artists:
Christiane Arbour (Québec, Canada)
Christian Barré (Québec, Canada)
Stephen Connolly (UK)
Jannick Deslauriers (Québec, Canada)
Jacques Desruisseaux (Québec, Canada)
Caroline Douville (Québec, Canada)
Dana Edmonds (Québec, Canada)
Marco Godinho (Luxembourg/France)
Trevor Gould (Québec, Canada)
Mo Laudi (France)
kimura byol-nathalie lemoine (Belgium / Québec, Canada)
Caroline Rochon-Gruselle (Québec, Canada)
Oli Sorenson (Québec, Canada)
Artistes
Christiane Arbour
Québec, Canada
Description of work
In the face of the pandemic, a large part of the planet’s humans withdrew from its natural or urban environment and became part of it. It was an opportunity to reclaim a lost inner life. Here the artist questions what happens to the environment when everyone is confined. She imagines that this state will be rather permanent when she realizes that pandemics of other kinds are to come. The artist imagines a universe of mechanical objects where the human is absent and where the physical and chemical elements continue their process of wear and mutation, sheltered from the human gaze. In a pictorial treatment bordering on realism and the abstract, the artist depicts metal or non- metallic machined objects, to interpret her emotional universe. These mechanical objects reveal a residual truth about our consumption and a bygone industrial world.
Bio
Christiane Arbour was born in Montreal, she lives and works in Laval. She holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in art education from Concordia University. She was a lecturer and a consultant in her field before devoting herself entirely to her artistic practice. In her paintings and drawings, Arbour interprets urban and mechanical landscapes where time and society subtly interact. Her works have been presented in solo exhibitions, including L’esthétique de l’objet mécanique at the Ville de Laval library (2020), Ferraille, scrapyard, nature et identité at the Circa gallery, Montreal (2019). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, notably at the Atelier Galerie 2112 (2022), the Société Canadienne d’éducation par l’art (2021), the Centre d’art de Montréal (2021), the Maison de la culture Mercier (2018) and the Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges (2000).
Spinning, 2019, oil on canvas
©Christiane Arbour
Christiane Barré
Québec, Canada
Description of work
This project proposes a collaboration with homeless people. It respects the limits of the physical distance of two meters (at2M). The digital payment encouraged by health measures restricts access to cash. It has an important consequence on begging.
Bio
Christian Barré is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. He is known for his urban maneuvers, staged in public spaces. He easily appropriates communication strategies to intervene with compassion in the social sphere. Encompassing a broad range of media such as photography, video, installation, publishing and social media, his work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in Quebec, Canada and abroad, including Space Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, USA (2005), Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal (2005), Montreal Biennale (2004), Le Mois de la Photo (2001). Barré won the 2nd international prize for the redevelopment of Champ de Mars in Montreal in 2010.
©Christian Barré
Stephen Connolly
Royaume-Uni
Description of work
Chek Lap Kok, 21.00, 01.12.19, documents a walk to Hong Kong Airport from the Expo centre on the airport island, by means of slow travel, under makeshift conditions, and without carbon expenditure. It’s a harbinger of lean and informal travel arrangements which may be a feature of time to come.
Watch on Vimeo
Bio
Stephen Connolly is an artist/filmmaker based in London, UK. His moving image practice aims to document and explore mobilities, materiality and socio-inequalities. His films have been widely shown internationally, including BEK (Bergen Norway 2020), Istanbul SALT (Turkey 2018) Wexner Centre Box (Ohio, USA 2017). He holds a PhD in Fine Art from University of Kent, and an MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design in London. He is Senior Lecturer in Film at University for the Creative Arts in UK.
Chek Lap Kok, 21.00, 01,12,19, 2019
©Stephen Connolly
Jannick Deslauriers
Québec, Canada
Instagram : @jannickdeslauriers
Description of work
The image represents the artist in a winter landscape of Quebec. She is wearing a coat made by herself and made of transparent vinyl stuffed with wood ash. With this project, she wanted to use the winter coat, here made of plastic, as an envelope for the body but also as a container for ashes. This garment, which is normally a protection against the cold, speaks to us here rather of protection in the sense of packaging, vacuum packing or conservation. For the artist, ash is the ultimate remnant of something. It is matter reduced to dust, it is what remains of a combustion. Ash is a presence that results from the absence of something, from its destruction. It is a memory matter that also speaks of survival. Wearing this coat and walking barefoot in the snow with this weight to drag evokes a difficult, uncomfortable advance. The ash and the plastic coat cover and seal her body from outer space but also make him carry the weight of an end, of a past. In the image, she finds herself buried but standing. Her body is covered with ashes that are encapsulated in the compartments of the mantle. In the making process, she fills these compartments with ashes using a teaspoon. This project is about time, space, territory, protection and what is left – what will be left.
Bio
Jannick Deslauriers is a Canadian artist known for her sculptures that explore memory, impermanence, fragility and ethereality through the construction of translucent, delicate and complex objects. She received her BFA from Concordia University in 2008 and her MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2022. Deslauriers has exhibited internationally, since her first museum solo exhibition Mémoire tangible at the Musée d’art de Joliette in 2011. Selected solo shows include Être imaginaire at 1700 La Poste in Montréal (2023), Habiter le trouble at Projet Casa in Montreal (2020) and Migration at Art Mûr in Leipzig (2017). She participated in numerous group shows including: Canada Now: Self-Abstractions in London, UK (2017); the Sharjah Islamic Art Festival (2016); Miniartextile in France and Italy (2015); La Biennale de Sculpture Contemporaine de Trois-Rivières (2014). Her work is part of collections in the Musée des Beaux Arts and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal.
Cendres II, 2020
©Jannick Deslauriers
Jacques Desruisseaux
Québec, Canada
Description of work
As part of the Future_Tense project, the artist looks at a world in which we need to slow down. A world in which humanity identifies more than ever with nature, and in which its choices will always be confronted between opposites. The works present the human being in this context of harmony and uncertainty. Humanity is fortunate to ind itself at the dawn of a reconstruction of the consciousness of living together. An awareness of the We as a community. The desire for change, for an intimate relationship that considers nature at the centre, rather than around us. An art of dealing with nature.
Bio
Jacques Desruisseaux lives and works in Lennoxville in the Eastern Townships, Quebec. For the past twenty years, his creative practice has been exploring gesturality in sculpture and photography. He received a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Laval University in 1992. He has presented several solo and group exhibitions and has completed artist residencies in Belgium, Holland, Hungary and Iceland. He has received several grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), Wallonie-Bruxelles and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC). One of his sculptures is part of the collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
La rencontre de soi, 2020
©Jacques Desruisseaux
Caroline Douville
Québec, Canada
Instagram : @erzu.lie
Description of work
This series addresses an issue that has been affecting the diaspora for a long time. How our appearance can sometimes give us the impression that we have to lend ourselves to a binary game. As a visible minority, the way we integrate into society can lead to our loss or our victory. Ghosts are traps into which we can fall: stereotypes, precariousness, communitarianism and many others. I wanted to address this subject but in a more playful and personal way. The future is concerned by the fact that this crisis of the virus amplifies the traps into which these diasporic individuals can fall. Moreover, the climate turmoil and political upheavals that await us will inevitably push more people to leave their countries of origin.
Bio
Caroline Douville, also known as Erzulie, is an artist and curator based in Montreal. She holds a BFA from Concordia University in 2017. Her artistic practice focuses on painting, drawing and installation. Douville has exhibited in Canada and abroad, including at the Clark Centre in Montreal (2022), afternoon projects in Vancouver (2022), New Image Art in Los Angeles (2022) and the Chandran Gallery in San Francisco (2021). From a second- generation Haitian diaspora background, her research centres on Haitian culture and its influence on local and global popular culture, demystifying the cognitive process how members of the diaspora interrogate the connections between local and distant identities, in relation to the effects of technologies on our visual perception in everyday life. Similarly, she explores the tension between fiction and reality, how certain images can be entangled to construct our understanding of contemporary phenomena and contribute to build a collective imagination.
PoC Man, 2020
©Caroline Douville
Dana Edmonds
Québec, Canada
Description of work
Dana Edmonds employs the medium of oil painting to explore various forms of urban waste and to investigate the relationship between overconsumption and its effects on mental health issues i.e. addiction, hoarding, anxiety and depression. Her new series, a collection of signs, text, and symbols, takes on a chaotic, assemblage-like quality. Forming a relationship between nature and culture, these images mirror consumptive habits within different times and spaces and the physical reality of everyday living.
Bio
Dana Edmonds maintains a multidisciplinary practice that is balanced between painting and graphic + web design. Born in Montreal, where she currently lives and works, Edmonds received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (1990). She has also studied Graphic Design at Dawson College and Art Education at McGill University. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the US, including One Earth, One Chance at the Rebecca Gallery, Toronto (2016), Show Your World at Gallery MC New York, New York (2016), the Ontario Society of Artists Exhibition at Neilson Park Creative Centre, Toronto (2016) and I am NSCAD at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax (2015). She is a recent recipient of an award from the Canada Council for the Arts 2020 and Montreal Art Council 2021.
Addiction Added, Better Forever, WTF, 2020
©Dana Edmonds
Marco Godinho
Luxembourg / France
Description of work
For Future_Tense, Marco Godinho presents a selection of images of two distinct works Written by Water and Left to Their Own Fate (Odyssey). Both works question the uncertainty of language, one by giving a voice to the sea (Mediterranean Sea), by listening to him, in a gesture of hospitality. The sea, water becomes the symbol of permanent change, the impossible memory of something that can not be kept with certainty. The future maintains here a hypothesis that it’s impossible to predict. A hypothetical future his here present in this invisible writing, that keeps hope in doubt and which escapes all categorization. The second work is an offering gesture to the sea, where each page of the book of Homer’s Odyssey is tored out after reading and then offered to the sea, to nature. The pages flew away and thus continued their journey, each following its own destiny. The fragmentation of this text – considered one of the founding poems of European civilisation – that his immersed in the Mediterranean Sea, page by page, resonates with the fate of today’s migrants and the lack of perspectives of a generation facing uncertain times, a future that is impossible to predict. These works try and invite us to re-evaluate our point of view of the world and reshape the conventional division between culture and nature. Here natural elements as water, wind, air, sun, earth become the actors of our common history, a hypothetical future.
Bio
Marco Godinho was born in Salvaterra de Magos, Portugal, he lives and works between Luxembourg and Paris. For the past fifteen years, Godinho has been deploying a singular universe, a reflection on our subjective experience of time and space. He addresses a post-conceptual practice, questions of exile, memory and geography, from installations and videos, through his writings and collaborative works. Godinho has presented his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including the 58th Venice Biennale, Luxembourg pavilion (2019), Le Parvis, Tarbes, France (2019), Darling Foundry, Montreal, Canada (2018), MAMAC – Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, Nice, France (2016), MNAC – Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, Lisbon, Portugal (2015). His work is also part of public collections, including Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, France ; MNAC – Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado,Lisbon,Portugal; Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
Left to Their Own Fate (Odyssey), 2019
©Marco Godinho
Trevor Gould
Québec, Canada
Description of work
Gould’s new watercolours respond to the idea of diversity in its double implication for the future of nature and culture, one of the prevalent themes in my work. Inter-species connection between Human nature and Animal nature is what forms this approach.[1]
These works thematically titled “The Human Brain Begins” reflect on the origins of thought for a future world influenced by recent archaeological interpretations of where human thought begins. The world has been the centre of visualisations in art since the earliest divisions of heaven and earth, all the way through to the models of the world presented in the World fairs of the 19th C. These works form a kind of visual archaeology of human presence and indeed the visualisation of human thought itself in the representation of human/hybrids.
We think of the last South African Quagga extinct in 1870, last Australian Tasmanian Devil extinct in 1933, the last Northern Rhino was extinct in March 2018, but do we ever ponder the last human being? Is this our human conceit or a projection of the future?
Bio
Trevor Gould was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, he lives and works in Montreal. He was a professor of sculpture at Concordia University between 1989 and 2018, and a Stiftungs professor in 2003 at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main, Germany. He has a teaching diploma in art at the Johannesburg College of Art, a degree in Sociology from the University of South Africa and a master’s degree on contemporary Canadian sculpture from the Carlton University, Ottawa. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, including Hilliard Art Museum (USA, 2022), Centre Clark (Montreal, Canada, 2018), FRAC Languedoc Roussillon (France), Museum of Contemporary Art Montreal, (2012, 2007 & 1998). His work can be found in several museums and corporate collections in Canada, Poland, Italy, France and Germany. Gould is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal, Canada, and Galerie Arte Giani in Frankfurt, Germany.
The Human Brain Begins, 2020
©Trevor Gould
Description of work
The year is 2099
Another documentary of slain black bodies
Lullaby of a freedom fighter
Will this be how I die
Just another hashTAG
Diaspora SOS the motherland
The stress compressed
Social media scrolls
Nunorm reality déjavu
Stanza Bopape in the Komati river
Emmett Till’s corpse in Tallahatchie
Truth and fiction dance
Hashtags and slogans
Archives of tragedies
Dismantling trauma
#ExfoliateToxicSystems
Who will cry
Will my life have mattered
Will black bodies matter
What would have changed
Erased, deleted from the future
Stuck in a time loop???
There is something wrong with the system. I was moved to tears finding out about Ahmaud Arbery, Joao Pedro. Yet another instance of police killing an unarmed black men. It reminded me of apartheid days in South Africa when black bodies were constantly executed. Our reality was systematic brutality. And now George Floyd… not being able to breathe took me back to Eric Garner and so many other horror stories.
In this fictional work – a short edited collage of found and personal footage – I am killed by the police in the future. This connects a protest and a tribute to all those shot while going about their daily peaceful lives as well as to those fighting for our freedom in South Africa, the US and all diasporas.
In the sound work I created, the 808 Sub Bass is a shout-out to Hip Hop, a 1970s arpeggiator meets soothing cellos. The multivocal tone singing I perform is reminiscent of a choir at political funerals: each vocal range comes out of a different speaker creating a surround sound effect. It is through participatory singing that the collective healing effect happens, like a lullaby with the calming effect needed after struggle.
Bio
Mo Laudi is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, DJ who lives and works between Johannesburg and Paris. He is also a research fellow at Stellenbosch University. He is known for his Globalisto philosophy and his key contributions to Afro-Electronic music. His artistic practice includes experiments with sound as material, sonic landscapes mixing vocals, textures and rhythms as sociopolitical critique of society. Inspired by African systems knowledge, post-apartheid transitionalism, international and underground subcultures, his investigations also find expression through painting, collage, sculpture, installations and video. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions internationally, including Dak’art (Dakar, 2022), Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum: Cultures of the world (Cologne, 2022), Kadist (Paris, 2021), Pompidou Centre (Paris, 2019).
#RIPMoLaudi, 2020
©Mo Laudi
kimura byol-nathalie lemoine
Belgique / Québec, Canada
Description of work
What would be the post-Covid19 era for an Asian from the diaspora living in the West?
Confinement was a safe mode for me…
except when I had to queue for basic groceries
My body will be even more aware of my surroundings. My future tensivity :
I will have deconstruct my trauma from my experience of anti-Asian aggression. I will have to learn to trust my social public spaces
So,
I will blank at the light on a wall
I will look up in the sky to skip condescending looks
I will squeeze a boiled egg to repress my frustration I will disappear from the frame(e)scape
I will have to CHIN up to take back my pride of what cowards took from me.
Bio
kimura byol-nathalie lemoine is a multimedia feminist artist based in Montreal, Canada. Zer works on various identity issues such as diaspora, ethnicity, colourism, post- colonialism, immigration and gender, and expresses through, conceptual art, digital images, videos, performance, calligraphy and poems, as well as collaborative work with other artists and public. Zer work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Samsung Insurance Gallery (Daejeon, 1996), Ilmin Museum (Seoul, 2000), Kyoto Municipal Museum (2005), AHL Foundation (NYC, USA, 2020), Bradley Ertaskiran Gallery (Montreal, 2020), Dazibao (Montreal, 2020). kimura-lemoine was selected for PHI residency 2021 and exhibited the resulting works at Fondation PHI ...room in a bag of stars. Also with zer duo DOIS (with Fernando Belote), they showed at Dare-Dare for 100 days, Festival Médiane at UQAM and at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (2022). Furthermore, kimura-lemoine, as curator, has developed several projects that give voice and visibility to marginalized communities
Petales, 2020
©kimura byol-nathalie lemoine
Caroline Rochon-Gruselle
Québec, Canada
Instagram : @carriethebeat
Description of work
My work is a reflection and product of time spent in quarantine and different states of mind that have arisen during this standstill. It sheds light on how one can feel both alien and isolated in an extraordinary and abrupt situation and hopeful and believing in a better future. It is a work of transition and transformation, seeking to process and make sense of our collective reality and our sense of place in it. The artworks also touch upon current societal issues such as housing, pollution and safeguard of our environment, consumerism and identity. I think these are issues that are primordial and may have to be addressed in a post Covid-19 world. The works submitted are the brainchild of these ponderings.
Bio
Caroline Rochon-Gruselle is a self-taught artist living and working in Montreal, Canada. Her work is inspired by the different possibilities of paper and influenced by the wabi-sabi concept, drawing from the art of imperfection and temporality as well as the natural world. She explores movement and space in the form of collage, characterized by paper and lines. Guided by intuition and imagination as well as enriched by her yoga practice, her creative process is a meditative experience that delves into memories, dreams and everyday life. Her work has been presented in several group exhibitions in Montreal, including McClure Gallery (2017, 2020), as well as art zine Semiaprilus (Estonia, 2020)andtheCoupeeCollageexhibition Post It (Belgium, 2022). She is currently an artist-in-residence at Kolaj Institute.
Irréelle / Otherworldly, 2020
©Caroline Rochon-Gruselle
Oli Sorenson
Québec, Canada
Description of work
The project entitled Group of Seven Pixels samples iconic paintings from The Group of Seven, among the most widely recognised works of Canadian art history. With these works, the artist wanted to play with the collective memory of Canadian cultural artefacts. He added pixilation on these artworks to express their translation in online settings, which he anticipates will be the only channel most people will be able to view the original works, for a long time after the current sanitary crisis.
Bio
Oli Sorenson was born in Los Angeles and lives and works in Montreal, Canada. He holds a PhD in interdisciplinary art at Concordia University, as well as a Master’s in Interactive Media and a BFA in Painting and Video, both at Université de Québec à Montreal. Sorenson’s remix art was first recognized in London, UK, after taking part in media art events at the Institute of Contemporary Art (2003-06), Tate Britain (2006), and the British Film Institute (2008-10). He also established an international profile when performing at ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2002), ISEA (Helsinki, 2004), Mapping (Geneva, 2009) and Sonica Festivals (Ljubljana, 2012). Recent solo exhibitions include Capitalocene? at Art Mûr (Montreal, 2022), and Panorama of the Anthropocene at Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges (Montreal, 2022). He also participated in numerous group shows such as the International Contemporary Art Symposium in Baie-Sait-Paul (2022), and International Digital Art Biennale at Arsenal (Montreal,2021). Sorenson is represented by Art Mûr gallery.
Group of seven pixels (from Lawren Harris), 2020
©Oli Sorenson
Acknowledgement:
Future_Tense: Ways to Envision the Future made possible with the support of Canada Council for the Arts.
