Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is proud to present "Apartment, 5 A" a new solo exhibition by Marc Audette, recent recipient of a prestigious Chalmers Arts Fellowship. The show is the result of work Audette produced in Argentina during a residency in the summer of 2009. This exhibition runs in parallel with a solo of new work by Adad Hannah.
Apartment, 5 A
This photographic series was taken during the summer of 2009. This corpus of work is the result of a project; a 2 month residency spent abroad.
I lived in a small three room apartment, on the fifth floor of a building in the neighborhood of San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina. It served as my photo studio. Working only with the furniture that was at my disposal, I started working.
The living room, composed of a round table, four chairs, a small television and a magnificent white sofa which had white cubes on each side, was the setting for my first series of images. Nude male and female bodies can be seen, wearing cardboard boxes on their heads are lying down on the magnificent white sofa. Still using the same background, a young man, like an insect drawn to light, dives head first into the luminous couch.
In the bedroom, also transformed into a studio, a body lays between two beds and sinks between green and white floral pattern sheets. The image’s beauty adds a strange sensation which is obtained by the setting.
For the last series, I decided to continue my project outside with people in the street. Two images depict a man pulling a cart of boxes, plastic bottles and other recyclable materials. Another image shows a man who looks on.
The work forms an ensemble where fiction and reality conjugate. The story evokes rather playful and sometime thoughtful outlook of those creative months passed during residency.
-Marc Audette
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Marc Audette studied fine art at the University of Quebec in Hull and earned a Masters in Visual Arts from York University. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Galerie 44 (Toronto), the McLaren Art Centre (Barrie) and DiVA Videoart Fair (New York).
In addition to teaching in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York’s Keele campus, he teaches a visual arts course in the Multidisciplinary Studies Department at the Glendon campus, and has been curator of the Glendon Gallery since 2001. He is an active member of Le Laboratoire (or Le LABO), a francophone production space in Toronto dedicated to research, production, training and showings in the field of multimedia visual arts.
His work can be found in several public and corporate collections including the City of Ottawa, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP.