Résider II

Karilee Fuglem, Annie Martin, Carmen Ruschiensky and Andrea Szilasi had exhibited together in an apartment on the Plateau Mont-Royal. It was in 1995, the project called Résider. Two years ago, the idea of repeating the experience crossed their minds. Thus was born Résider II, which Galerie B-312 is very happy to host with the complicity of La Centrale. -As in 1995, the artists rented an apartment, the time to work there and to present the result of the cohabitation of four artistic minds. This time they have chosen to turn their sensibility towards a place steeped in history, an apartment in the Saint-Henri district located at the north-west corner of Saint-Ambroise and Sainte-Marguerite streets, in an 1889 building classified as a historical monument.-Karilee Fuglem, like a surveyor of the invisible, delicately pulls threads through the apartment. The artist was inspired by the history of the place, its origin, its future and its present, which she has conscientiously studied. For her part, Annie Martin is listening, dozens of ears, by concealing microphones on the building's exterior facades. Noises from the street and the neighbourhood are picked up, amplified and reproduced by small loudspeakers, most of which are located in one of the rooms of the apartment. In another room, Andrea Szilasi has frames on the walls that remind us of the photographs of loved ones that we have here and there at home. But these portraits show collages that fragment the image more than they give it to read, as if the artist wanted to stage the places we reserve for the past in our apartments where photos, memories and brimborions often rub shoulders for no reason. Carmen Ruschiensky disposes of objects of domestic life, knick-knacks, utensils, here and there in the kitchen. A certain organized disorder invades the premises and can be received both as simple traces of life left by hypothetical tenants and as the artistic result of a work of contamination of the space. -This in situ artwork is accompanied by an exhibition at Galerie B-312 where the artists exhibit works conceived in the spirit and with the means they used in the apartment to stage the mnemonic material of the place.-Resider II will be punctuated by activities led by La Centrale: the presentation of the project by the artists; guided visit by Karilee Fuglem and Annie Martin of the incredible places they discovered in the neighbourhood; not to be missed either, the showcase of La Centrale, at 4296 Saint-Laurent Street, another intervention space of the project.

Translation of a text by Jean-Émile Verdier et Émilie Renaud-Roy