Catherine Plaisance: Infortunes
Dark Countryside: A Group Exhibition    Aug 13 - Sep 10, 2011

“Inside the dark gallery, photographs, a scale model and video interact in both obvious and mysterious ways. Obvious, because we can recognize glimpses of the same place and the same objects; mysterious, because the thread linking the tableaux making up the half-lugubrious, half-playful scene before us seems riddled with, if not impossibilities, then at the least incongruities hindering any attempt at narrative reconstruction. . . . Loaded with all this ambiguity and fragmentation, Infortunes does not so much make us see specific, disastrous events that have actually occurred and are replicated here, as lead us towards the concept and the representation of generic disaster—the disastrous. . . .” (Excerpt from Infortunes, by Marjolaine Arpin)

Dark Countryside
A group exhibition

The exhibition Noire campagne explores the dark side of landscape. In contrast with the pastoral and bucolic image generally associated with this genre of painting, the artists brought together for this exhibition offer us often disquieting, inhospitable depictions of countrysides. Straying far from the idyllic view inherited from the landscape painting tradition, the scenes offered here show panoramas that are disturbing either because they supremely convey the threat of a power we cannot control, or because various human actions have altered the landscape, imperilling the “natural order” and changing our relationship to the land. This group exhibition includes works by Bertrand Carrière, Dominique Goupil, Betty Goodwin, Graeme Patterson, Marc Séguin and Irene F. Whittome.

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