This exhibition brings together works that mark the career of Montreal artist Raymond Gervais since the early 2000s. Since 1973, Gervais has created installations, performances, textual and photographic works that, in the tradition of conceptual art, question the intersections of sound, space and reproduction technologies. Moreover, his work questions the possible intersections of time and space by staging fragments of language from literary, musical, cinematographic and scientific history: proper names of historical figures, instruments, places, winds, emblematic phrases from different sources including quotes from writers or others, staging of photographs taken from history (or from the artist’s present experience) or natural phenomena such as tornadoes.
His installations include various components related to sound and image reproduction technologies, including CD cases, which he has used extensively since their inception. He has also incorporated phonographs, record players, cassette recorders, CD players, DVD cases, magnetic tapes, vinyl records, record sleeves, and other audiovisual devices into his works, in addition to objects of personal or collective memory or everyday use. With all these constantly intersecting references and activated hyperlinks, Raymond Gervais’s work has a “choral” (Greek chorus), namely a poetic-political dimension, to which certain works in this exhibition particularly attest through their eminently empathetic character.
Entitled “Via,” the exhibition presents a series of works referring to various individuals—artists, musicians, and writers—via some of their works in the form of narratives, notations, quotations, or specific historical events.
Document(s):
notes-exposition-r-gervais-mars-2017
