Cimes et cieux
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present Cimes et cieux, an exhibition featuring three long-time collaborators of the gallery Glenda Leon, Marc Audette and Edward Maloney; and welcoming Lise Beaudry for the first time. Through photography and video, the invited artists represent fleeting experiences in nature that are caught as the trees touch the sky.
Lise Beaudry is interested in photographing treetops at a specific time of year – when the trees themselves are almost completely stripped of their leaves, and set against a sky on the verge of snow. These personal and ephemeral vistas emerge during long car rides between Toronto and Earlton, the northern Ontario village where she grew up.
Edward Maloney’s Latitude series explores the relationship between travelling in a bus and the development of an abstracted vision of colour. His blurred and luminous landscapes are based on Polaroids taken by the artist while traveling in southern Quebec.
Marc Audette photographs skies as dusk falls. This interest has led him to travel all across the Americas. In his works, canopies of trees accentuate the ambient darkness of the forest landscape, and draw attention to the disappearing light in the night sky. The canopy itself, as the artist discovered, is a habitat rich in life and sounds.
Glenda Leon’s video Delirio II invites us to "listen to things and to watch sound." What appears as a solitary tree within a landscape transforms in a vibrant and unexpected flash.
The gallery’s front window space features a photographic and light-based installation by Marc Audette from his series The Line. This intervention incorporates a portable lighting system that was repurposed by the artist for use in the forests of the Americas. The bright line of light that also runs through the artist’s photograph operates like a drawing tool, exploring and embracing the landscape while suggesting new narrative paths.
Cimes et cieux brings together a diverse group of works that all reflect our own natural desire to catch, and to hold onto the transient in life.