François Lalumière
Emmanuel Galland

AVENIR AVENUE (PREQUEL)
08.28–10.04.2014
Room 1

This isn’t the first time Emmanuel Galland and François Lalumière have worked as a pair. In 2010 they worked as a team on Retourne-moi / Invert Me Out. The two artists were hired to create an inverted copy of the facade of the neighbouring Maison du peintre business. They painstakingly reproduced all the products on display in the window front as well as the boutique’s sign and outside fixtures.

For Avenir Avenue (Prequel), the artists take over the CLARK Room using retractable tape barriers that are generally used for crowd control. Therefore, the artists create a trap device that questions operating processes and how pieces of art are displayed in galleries as well as how spectators circulate through the room. To access the showing, visitors have to follow a pre-established path, a path that leads to the unknown, one that leads their bodies as well as their line of sight. The visitors have a limited field of vision when viewing the works and need to constantly focus on where they were walking while viewing the artwork.  The exhibit’s obvious course offered no entrance or exit and had no beginning or end, playing off contradictions.

The glossy images of varying sizes that cover the walls of the room make Avenir Avenue (Prequel) a collage/display. No information is provided with the images, evacuating any indication of their composition and authorship. This lack of differentiation counterpoints the hybridization of elements in the exhibit, playing off a succession of crossings and pathways. “Prequel” in the exhibit title is used to present its origin and serves as a flashback or as a return to the past for the work’s premise. Photos of the artists at the age of 19 are one of the more obvious elements of the work. The two large-scale portraits, presented at a great height and angle serve as a constant presence by the artists as overseers, surveying our meanderings.

The artists also make use of the gallery’s floor space by reproducing a plan of the room to scale, that acts as a “mise en abyme” for the gallery space. In the centre of the exhibit one can see a starry figure which represents the four cardinal points, as well as the recurring motif in the exhibition, the arrow, repeated here and there. Rather than guiding us however, these multiple arrows make us loose our sense of direction.

Avenir Avenue (Prequel) illustrates an individual and collective future, which, through the device created by the artists, leads us to question our own conditioning. The dialogue created by the two artists’ practices, including Galland’s dedication to collective icons that circulate throughout society and François Lalumière’s vision which focuses on urban actions, serve as a metaphor for the concept of artistic pathways and a negotiation of aesthetics that integrate ideas, materials and processes.

Manon Tourigny