PASCAL GRANDMAISON: MECHANICAL DREAMS
September 20, 2008 — October 18, 2008
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Pascal Grandmaison MECHANICAL DREAM: OHI PLANT, NIKON INC., JAPON, 19 Digital chromogenic print mounted
| Pascal Grandmaison The exact is superior to the vague... The exact is superior to the vague, Realty is superior to imitation, 2008 Digital chromogenic print mounted on Plexiglas
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Pascal Grandmaison THE MEMORY, THE FEEDBACK, 2008 Digital chromogenic print mounted
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The gallery is pleased to announce the
RE-OPENING OF OUR RENOVATED AND EXPANDED SPACE.
Join us for the Canadian Art Hop conversation with Pascal Grandmaison and critic Leah Sandals, 3.30 PM. Reception for the artist to follow, 4 to 6 PM.
Pascal Grandmaison participated in the inaugural exhibition at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects in May 2005. We are pleased to welcome this Montreal artist back with a new body of work to herald the re-opening of our renovated and expanded space.
An active presence on the contemporary art scene here and abroad since the latter part of the 1990s, Pascal Grandmaison has been critically acclaimed for his distinctive use of photography and film. As curator Pierre Landry has noted, “Beyond an apparent detachment from people and things, Grandmaison’s works express and combine, with remarkable assurance, situations whose ambiguity contains an indisputable energy.”
In this exhibition Grandmaison will show a film piece and new photographic works. Several pieces made over the past year originate in the minute details of the mechanics of production that he transforms into abstractions of line and form. These images quietly capture the aura of the unseen miracle of photographic reproduction. Grandmaison re-visits historical technical and conceptual advances in film and photography in this pure meeting of function and form.
In his Background series Grandmaison refers cryptically to the scene in Antonioni’s 1966 film masterpiece, “Blow-up,” where the photographer’s back-drop paper, surely a symbol of the artifice of the photographic image, is brought tumbling down in a crumpled heap. The moment is modestly quoted in the sculptural folds of crunched–up packing material from Gandmaison’s studio, here elevated to a portrait on a pristine ground. His rainbow-like linear compositions, Mechanical Dreams, are reminiscent of large-scale abstract paintings of Montreal painters of the 1960s, however they originate in the diminutive focal length markers found on the reflex camera lens, thus becoming an elegantly subtle homage to a past moment of instrumental design.
Pascal Grandmaison’s work was featured in a solo exhibition seen at the Musee d’art contemporain and the National Gallery of Canada in 2006-7. From September 27, 2008 to January 4, 2009 a major exhibition of recent film and photographic work will be on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, accompanied by an abundantly illustrated monograph with essays by Sara Knelman, curator at the AGH, and Diana Nemiroff, Director of the Carleton University Art Gallery where the exhibition originated.
Artists:
Pascal Grandmaison