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1925 - 2025 : une expo-fleuve

During 2025 l’Endroit indiqué welcomed Janice Gurney, Nico Pam Dick and Stephen Collis as the first contributors to a ongoing cycle of art works that together are a work of agregate thinking. For this cinematic live event of moments, concocted expressly to be seen from the street, each contributor will add a new element to the flow of images, words and things that already inhabit this vitrine / storefront space. These individual works build as a group of co-mingled gestures which mark a passage of thinking between: an unfinished whole which is a way of thinking together. We are wondering what makes this present moment, what makes a life, what makes the points of reference for a thoughtful reflection on what it is to think about our highly charged ‘now.’ - Andrew Forster [arrangement]

[click images to expand]

L'Endroit indiqué is a storefront in the Plateau area of Montreal, on the corner of rue Marie-anne and avenue Laval. These large corner windows were probably a corner store in the past. This is a not-so-quiet residential area bounded by busy commercial streets (St-Laurent and St-Denis). There is a school across the street. Rue Marie-anne is a pedestrian short cut from the metro to Parc Mont-Royal. As a venue l'Endroit is less about being an instrument in professional networks and more about people coming around the corner on their various repeating trajectories and noticing that something strange and perhaps compelling is going on.


JANICE GURNEY : For many years I made works with film stills, using them as one element within a context that might include photographs, paintings and text. I have been stongly drawn to the images in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. The beauty of their structure is both lush and stark. My recent work with film stills is more direct.The still that I used in La paix est faible / Peace is Weak is taken from Antonioni’s 1962 film l’Eclisse (Eclipse). The image is of the back of a man’s head as he walks in a crosswalk while reading an Italian newspaper with a bleak headline. It is juxtaposed with an image of the back of a woman’s head as she walks in a crosswalk while reading a newspaper. The headline in her newspaper is translated (for this exhibition into French and English). The second photograph was taken 60 years after the film was made.




MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI : l’Eclisse (The Eclipse), 1962. With Alain Delon and Monica Vitti. Filmed in Rome's EUR district, begun by Mussolini as the modernist home for a world's fair that never took place, completed in the 1960s. The final 7 min. sequence of l’Eclisse, where the camera wanders away from the protagonists is a famous cinematic montage of images evoking a darkening view of a modern designed world as the backdrop to a C20 existential crisis.

LINK to 5min film clip

NICO PAM DICK : L’Espace éphémère. An alterspace. Iterative zone to view, inhabit. Drawing it means entering. What rests by changing? L’ébauche, l’éclat. Pour s’écarter. Reject eclipse: for now, elude hard fact. Rebel with play to counter danger. Thus form a two-layer interval with Gurney’s install, outlook, gesture. Set in oscillation. Mais le dessin lui-même vibre. It transceives. With minimal structure, maximal negative space. The formal as the private, intimate. Yet open. Intimation. And not cold: delicate, handmade. Contra Antonioni? Contrast L’Eclisse’s images of the sharp, balconied building, the stalled new building, deserted areas, with L’espace’s empty/full designs. There, the minimal and incomplete seem harsh, ominous, if also beautiful. Here, they try for modest, luminous. With abstract joy, as of his film’s protagonist at airfield. Geometry’s still motion yielding other sense of moving picture. Fast and flickering. The way is to keep making. A temporary dwelling-place. A model of a micropeace? A spacedraft’s paper architecture. To spatialize, to spiritualize the Now.



PARADISO / DIASPORA

"If we take the Italian word for paradise - paradiso - and rearrange the letters, we get diaspora ... A whole new exercise could be inherent in this anagram, one that might slowly shift the address of paradise." — Inger Christensen

from Stephen Collis, The Middle, p104


BIO - JANICE GURNEY : In 1977 Janice Gurney moved from Winnipeg to Toronto with her husband Andy Patton, where they both became part of the art community. In 1992 the Winnipeg Art Gallery organized Sum Over Histories, a ten year survey exhibition of her work that travelled to five locations across Canada. Gurney received a Ph.D in Art and Visual Culture from Western University, London, Ontario in 2012. Her work is in several collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and Museum London. Gurney is the co-editor with Julian Jason Haladyn of Community of Images: Strategies of Appropriation in Canadian Art, 1977-1990 published by YYZBOOKS in 2022.

BIO - NICO PAM DICK : Artist, writer and philosopher Nico Pam Dick (aka Moyna/Moina/Gregoire Pam Dick et al.) is the author of five hybrid prose-poetry books, four of which include drawings and/or text pages composed as drawings. Her works explore unruly play, vagabond notations, spare or dense improvised structures and spaces—visual, translingual, sonic, conceptual. Taken together, these works belong to the shifting region that is The Demo Zones. While Dick is based in New York, where most of her art demos hide out, she also frequents Montreal, where some such demos seem less reclusive. She is author of the author of Metaphysical Licks (BookHug, 2014) and Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009).

BIO - STEPHEN COLLIS : Author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018) — all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He serves on the board of trustees of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, and has participated in an annual walk with asylum seekers in the UK since 2015.