Recent Acquisitions
Shayne Dark
Wildfire, 2009
Wood and paint
Various dimensions
Site-specific work executed for the MAJ
Gift of the artist
Wildfire is one of a series of assemblages entitled Here and Gone, a major undertaking on which Dark has been working since 2006. The pieces in the series are composed of branches collected in the woods, which he assembles to create simple geometric or formally exploded structures. Adapted to the spatial and structural features of the sites where they will appear, these works are the result of a process of assemblage that allows for what is accidental and undetermined. They are adjustable and present a different shape whenever they are placed in a new setting. This characteristic is important to the artist as it reflects the changeableness of nature, which transforms itself with every season. Dark executed Wildfire specifically for the Musée d’art de Joliette, installing it right in a tree standing in front of the Museum entrance. It was created from pieces of driftwood that he collected on the banks of Fourteen Island Lake near his home, some fifteen kilometres north of Kingston, Ontario. The installation rises out of the Manitoba maple that was already standing on the site of the Museum when it was built in 1975.
Jérôme Fortin
Untitled, 2004
Collage (made of Japanese mangas) on Arches paper
56 x 76 cm
Donation Maurice Forget
This collage reflects the ongoing development of artist Jérôme Fortin’s oeuvre. Unique in his practice, it is the very first piece in his Écrans, a series presented in a retrospective of his work shown at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2007. The Écrans – composed of strips of paper woven together and then juxtaposed – are remarkable for a certain formal unity that enhances the abstract quality of the whole. Here we find a more defined insertion into the pictorial space that is somewhat different from the qualities of shape and object characteristic of his previous works. In this sense, the Écrans herald a kind of rupture in the approach of Fortin, who is nearing the middle of his career, a rupture that he seems to have embarked upon with his series of Marines (2002), now in the collection of the Musée d’art de Joliette.
François Lacasse
Solipse, 1995
Oil on canvas
115 x 180 cm
Gift of Maurice Forget
Solipse is characteristic of the artist’s concerns at the start of his career. It can be regarded as a prime example of the transitory period between the completion of his university studies and the early 1990s. This was the period when Lacasse was defining the parameters of his practice, gradually abandoning the use of figurative elements and the use of quotation in order to investigate the more formal aspects of painting. His canvases are covered with a layer of a transparent medium on to which he deposits ink with a dropper in such a way as to allow gravity to decide its trajectory. The method involves manipulating the canvas so that the flowing ink makes its own way across the transparent medium, at the same time veiling the surface of the work. The references to Old Masters that previously performed this function are thus abandoned in favour of a kind of mist obscuring the foreground, the aim being to create a tension born of the image suggested, an image that is never entirely visible.
François Lacasse
Grandes pulsions II, 2007
Acrylic and ink on canvas
189.5 x 152.5 cm
Gift of the artist
The Grandes pulsions series, begun in 2005, comprises over fifteen works. Moving away from the drip technique and the coloured canvases of previous series, in this work Lacasse pursues an optical experiment based on his observation of chromatic harmonies composed of monochrome or contrasting colours. Using a superimposition of flat planes of colour he seeks to bring out the chromatic nuances of monochromes; here the energy of the image is generated by the linking of the coloured planes. The accumulation of layers of pigment speaks of a single repeated gesture, that of pouring the paint with a measuring implement. After his use of misty images, the free rein given to colour, the capture of movement, transparency and the revelation of an illusory depth, this painting may be thought of as an end product of the numerous experiments Lacasse has carried out in the course of his career; it demonstrates the advances made in his research into the formal aspects of painting.
Monique Mongeau
Poire d’ombre, 1997
Oil on canvas
30 x 30 cm
Gift of Maurice Forget
Poire d’ombre, executed in 1997, marks the end of a series of works that Monique Mongeau started in 1993, which focused on in-depth studies of a specific motif in nature, the pear. In the series Mongeau depicted the pear from every angle in order to fully demonstrate the vulnerability of nature. A pear, first painted whole (in Pirus, 1993), was then seen only as fragments (in the series De Pyrrhus à pira, 1994), thereafter as simple debris (Pédoncules, 1996), and finally was identifiable only by the shadow it cast (Poire d’ombre, 1997). This painting represents the ultimate stage of the artist’s meditation on the fragility of the natural world.
Georg Pencz
Herodias with the Head of Saint John the-Baptist, 16th century
Engraving
4.4 x 7.5 cm
Gift of Virginia Lemoyne, in memory of Raymond D. LeMoyne
The engraving of Herodias with the Head of Saint John the-Baptist is characteristic of Pencz’s small-format output. He executed several scenes of beheadings taken from the Old Testament, such as Samson and Delilah, Judith and Holofernes, and also Salome with the head of Saint John the Baptist. Pencz’s technique was very much in the Dürer manner. The complexity of the image is based on clean elegant parallel lines, together with hatching for the backgrounds, producing the fine detail typical of Pencz’s style. Notable are the bold framing of the composition, the close-up view of the protagonists and the liberty the artist takes in referring back to the beheading on the left of the frieze. Pencz was one of the artists who, through contact with the Italians and under the influence of Dürer, were captivated by the new approach of the Renaissance while maintaining the high quality of engraving found in the workshops of the Rhine in the 16th century.
Ana Rewakowicz
Travelling with my Inflatable Room, 2004-2005
Double channel video projection
4 min 30 s, loop
Edition 1 of 2
Gift from the artist
Travelling with my Inflatable Room is a double channel video in which we view a montage of images filmed by the artist during a performance tour she took across Canada in 2004. For a month Rewakowicz travelled across the country with Inside Out, a large structure of inflatable latex representing a bedroom. This model of a static, private room became during the artist’s pan-Canadian odyssey a movable public structure that could be adapted to whatever outdoor sites she found herself in, in town or country, on private land, on a river bank or in the mountains. The soundtrack of the video is the composition Going, Going, Gone by The Stars.
Henri Venne
Polarization, 1994
Silver print (left panel)
and acrylic (right panel) on Hi-art cardboard
36 x 41 cm
Gift of Maurice Forget
Polarisation was created in 1994, in a period of transition at the start of Henri Venne’s practice. As such, it marks an important stage in his development as an artist, since it is one of the earliest pieces in which he abandoned the method of covering the photograph with a gloss made of an acrylic medium which characterized his previous work in order to establish a dialogue between the illusory space of the photograph and the real space of the work, that is, the pictorial surface. This new approach of juxtaposing the photograph and the painting is notable for a more abstract sort of photography, the visual elements of the composition being continued (or echoed) in the painted canvas juxtaposed to it. This visual strategy is intended to add complexity to the reading of the work and our perception of it, while demonstrating the pictorial similarities between photograph and painting. Venne would continue to explore these two juxtaposed realities until 2010.
