Ludovic Boney: NSPSLL!

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to invite the public to discover Ludovic Boney's installation NSPSLL! Taking into account his current preoccupations with the notions of pathways, immersive experiences, installations and devices, the artist suggests an elsewhere, another place that is not necessarily a physical and real place, and offers us to experience a dreamlike world at the limits of the absurd and/or improbable. NSPSLL! has been adapted to the unique characteristics of the building on Rachel, bringing out, among other things, a circular path and a canopy in the skylight.

In the magazine Espace no. 120, Marie Perrault writes with great insight about NSPSLL! presented for the first time at Action Art Actuel (St-Jean-sur-Richelieu) in 2018: 

 (unofficial translation follows)

"The installation proposes to the viewer to cross the space (...) of the gallery on a path of mattresses surrounded by a forest of tangled planks, supporting an array of trinkets from discount stores. Glittering decorations and streamers, decorative fruit, toy trucks, beach games and children's paddling pools, decoys, fishing fleets and rubber boots, an array of props held together by an array of explicitly expressed materials ranging from square ties to gaffer tape, string to flexible rubber tubes. A complex compressed air system, powered by five industrial compressors displayed in the window, activates the whole mess. Each step we take activates a valve that triggers a series of mechanisms, creating a joyful din of blasts, whistles, various flutes, bubbles and splashes, as well as impact and bumper hits.

Ludovic Boney seems at first to imagine this kinetic choreography of junk for our sole amusement. These trinkets chosen for their eye-catching visual character testify to fantastical utopias subjected to a commercial and advertising enterprise. The installation includes various allusions to this aesthetic of excess and glitz, conveyed by a market that sells and praises emancipation through pleasure and entertainment. These figures of superficiality, accessories of leisure activities, lead us to believe that happiness lies in the accumulation of things outside of any moral responsibility. However, they are easily exhausted and remain doomed to rapid obsolescence, both in terms of their meaning and their usefulness. The colossal work required of the artist and his team to create the NSPSLL! installation is a gesture of resistance to this consumerism, an eloquent critique of this flashiness fed by a concern for the exaggerated spectacular.

(...) The forest of the NSPSLL! installation also refers to a singular experience of the natural environment. Several objects that it integrates refer directly to outdoor activities, swimming, hunting and fishing or picnics, to animal figures, plastic ducks, paper geese and fake fish, or to different forms of plants ranging from bouquets of cut flowers to decorative garlands. This hedonism in the open air also turns out to contribute to the transformation of natural spaces into dedicated places of consumption. Just like the previous ones, this recent work by Ludovic Boney confronts us with antinomic experiences of nature, that of a territory apprehended simply by the body, opposed to that of its artificial imitation and its spectacularization peddled by a frantic consumerism. The impressive quantity of products and useless merchandise that stand today between us and a simpler experience of the place, raises in a rather strong way the question of the survival of our planet. In front of this work, our amusement turns out to be more anxious than it seems at first sight." - unofficial translation (Espace no. 120, Fall 2018, p. 88-89).

The gallery would like to thank all those who contributed to the realization of this installation and would like to acknowledge the work of the scenographer Julie Lévesque.

In the gallery's second room, Ludovic Boney presents six new works inspired various projects.

Ludovic Boney (born in 1981) is a sculptor from Wendake, Quebec. Recognized for his public artworks, Ludovic also regularly participates in renowned events such as the Contemporary Native Art Biennale (2016), the Manif d'art de Québec (2018, 2019) and more recently, the exhibition De tabac et de foin d'odeur. Là où sont nos rêves curated by Guy Sioui Durand at the Musée d'art de Joliette (2019). He has been selected to participate in this year's edition of the Bonavista Biennale. Nominated for the long list of the Sobey Award in 2017, he is also the recipient of several grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Reveal grant offered by the Hnatyshyn Foundation.

 The gallery thanks SODEC for its support.