Expomobile at the Villa — 1st edition
In summer 2019, Verticale — centre d’artistes invites the public aboard the Villa — véhicule d’arts actuels et numériques for a collective exhibition organized in partnership with the Accès culture network!
Six artists and collectives from Verticale’s programming season present recent works, with both the theme and the context of the exhibition conververging around the notion of mobility. The works aboard the Villa tackle, in their own ways, questions of displacement and mapping, creative dwelling and exploration in urban space. By turns contemplative, intimate, critical, funny and troubling, the projects have been made and presented using digital tools, offering a varied, ground-level portrait of contemporary creation.
Launched in spring 2018, Villa is the first mobile laboratory equipped for digital creation. A site of creation and production, as well as a site of micro-presentation, promotion and mediation, Villa is a truck (of the food truck variety) outfitted to host artists working in contemporary and digital art, with a mandate of going out and meeting the public and citizens. Villa is an unconventional presentation venue, but it is also an object/material that is in itself open to transformation.
Programming
Roby Provost Blanchard — Rencontre in-game
Wearing a virtual reality helmet, the player floats over a 3D-constructed environment. Digital photographs taken in Laval, Burlington and Lac Châteauvert appear, creating an impossible urban landscape from a surreal blend of elements.
Pascale Théorêt-Groulx — « Un peu plus haut, mon torse veille sur vous »
Pascale Théorêt-Groulx took to the skies over Île Jésus with the help of a drone, which she used to carry and deliver paper messages to specific individuals in residential neighbourhoods. Nicknamed EAI (Entité Aérienne Instable, or Unstable Aerial Entity in English), the drone captured these experiences in video and transmitted them poetically to the screen, accompanied by the artist’s narration.
Galerie Galerie — Grosses données lavalloises
The online art space Galerie Galerie spearheaded a series of hands-on workshops focused on the creation of GIF-animated avatars for the Web. The public’s creations are gathered in an online collective exhibition that takes the form of a satellite image as well as a hashtag cloud. As a collective work, this mishmash of data underscores the unique, the creative and the human, while simultaneously offering a surprising virtual portrait of a community.
Les Oracle.sss (Magali Babin, Marie-Claude Gendron, Katherine-Josée Gervais)
The artists rooted themselves into an unfamiliar terrain by using performative actions to establish dialogues with the various physical, psychic and energetic features they came across. The starting point of their actions was a stone arch that for decades has marked the entry to a neighbourhood—the sort of structure that marks, symbolically, passage to another world… With their ritualistic and mystical approach, they aim to uncover the mysteries that the landscapes they explore might hold in store.
Janie Julien-Fort — Chantiers sous surveillance
The artist uses a photographic technique called solargraphy, which requires exposure times of as long as several months. Hundreds of small pinhole cameras were affixed to features of the landscape surounding construction sites, in accordance with the sites’ project timelines. The images obtained were scrupulously filed, mapped and documented before being made available on-line via an interactive map. The work is accompanied by a handbook explaining the technique of solargraphy.
Lagueux & L’Ecuyer — La pêche à la mouche à feu
A co-creation project involving citizens as part of a series of creation workshops focused on electronic art, leading to the production of a lustrous interactive exhibition in public space. The work is set up around the Villa truck; its shape adapts to the specificities of the surrounding environment.
6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
1 p.m. – 4 p.m.
11:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
3:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
3:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.