"It was while observing one of my professors 30 years ago that the idea came to me: instead of trying to figure out what he was trying to say, I started to watch how he said it. Since then, I started to travel through all life's layers of signs and meanings, drawing pleasure from the discovery of the incongruous in the familiar and the similarities between new or unusual contexts.
This game of tripping between the levels of reality magnified both my love of traveling and the pleasure I took from just standing still before an ordinary and familiar window. Gradually, my perception shifted from the object toward the context, from isolation toward immersion, from the portrait to the landscape, from the framing to the entire horizon beyond.
In Voyage dans les Alpes, Horace Benedict De Saussure described the importance of wholistic views, as opposed to the excessive details that mask them. Inspired by the vista from the peak of the Buet Glacier, the instructions De Saussure left for the illustrator Théodore Bourrit embodied Saussure's all-encompassing view. Saussure's observations, penned 237 ago, helped clarify the usefulness of this process for me.
Today, this sense of the whole takes shape through a fresh reading of ordinary textures and the spaces that emerge. The true subject of this exhibition is the virtual and conceptual space that envelops the gallery then unfurls through several windows placed within the space. Physical objects are sign posts, clues, keys that unlock this space and lend it coherence. Thus, the artefacts, some 30 years old, provide a measure of the transformations that, over time, forge an artistic process."
- Luc Courchesne
