Quebec Scene

Dé-con-structions

Featured artists: Michel de Broin, Jean Pierre Gauthier, Karilee Fuglem, Tricia Middleton, Annie Thibault

Curator: Josée Drouin Brisebois

De-con-structions focuses on works by artists living in Quebec whose interventions question in one way of another, the museum as idea and context. The practices of these artists are experimental in that they seek new ways to perturb our expectations of what is an art object and how galleries have come to inform and influence our experience of art. Michel de Broin, Karilee Fuglem, Annie Thibault, Jean-Pierre Gauthier and Tricia Middleton work with a great variety of materials and strategies to create their sometimes amusing, but always thought-provoking installations. The five installations created or adapted by these artists for De-con-structions at the National Gallery of Canada prompt the museum to confront and question its role of collecting, preserving, and displaying art. In their hands, the gallery space itself is transformed from a repository for art into an artist's studio and laboratory - a site for formulating, testing, and experimenting with ideas through the creation and exhibition of art.

The exhibition will be presented in four of the National Gallery of Canada's contemporary galleries and will be accompanied by a small publication.