SCREEN 2010 - Exhibition 10 - When the Night Comes

SCREEN 2010
Canadian art. Your screen.

Exhibition No. 10 — January 19, 2010
When the Night Comes
Curated by Nathalie de Blois

Featuring — Jocelyne Alloucherie (winner of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2000), Carlos and Jason Sanchez, Ed Pien, Myfanwy Macleod, Shary Boyle, Chih-Chien Wang, Angèle Verret and Sébastien Cliche

Curatorial Statement

After the sun sets and the inky darkness of night surrounds the landscape, shadows appear, first clear and sharp, then out of focus and shifting, to the fumbling confusion of our mind and eye. Night is a passage that allows us to peek behind the curtains of mundane appearance and draws us to a place of possibility; where the line between reality and fiction becomes blurred. As its title suggests, this exhibition evokes a twilight path into night, the appeal of the void and the path lost, but also reaches back to a time populated by dreams, visions, disquieting specters and fantastic creatures. Both the beauty and fears of the nocturnal imagination are conjured up in turn by the works presented in this exhibition.

Nathalie de Blois – Curator

Since 1997, Nathalie de Blois has curated several exhibitions that have travelled throughout Quebec and Europe. She is presently curator of contemporary art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, where she organised the exhibition Michel de Broin. Machinations in 2006; an overview exhibition on Quebec’s art scene called It Happened in your Neighbourhood in 2008 and in 2009 a group show Emporte-moi/Sweep Me off My Feet, which examines the turbulences of love through the works of over 30 international artists.

Artist Books/Books by Artists in the Cultural Olympiad

Books, Records
Curated by Dave Dyment

photo left: Michael Snow.

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Perhaps because of influential publishers and distributors in the 70s (Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and Art Metropole, respectively) Canada has a rich history of producing art designed to infiltrate book and record stores.

Michael Snow’s The Last LP is a classic artist’s audio work, and his Cover to Cover is possibly the most renowned artist book ever printed - a rare case where a Canadian work defines the genre.

Snow’s works bookend this exhibition, which otherwise draws on artists who explore the structure, content and possibilities of books via published works, photographs, handcrafted facsimile and trompe l’oeil. The works examine our relationship to these objects and to each other, while questioning the authority of the codex.

The records selected here share a relationship to books. Davis’s charred vinyl refers to book burning and The Last LP is about the form of the vinyl record, as a printed package. It features extensive liner notes that both set up and eventually give away the trompe l'oeil.

Dave Dyment is a Toronto-based curator, artist and writer. From 2004 to 2008, he was director of programming at Mercer Union. Prior to that he was at Art Metropole for five years, where he curated numerous exhibitions. Other projects include Nuit Blanche 2008 and a forthcoming volume on Artists’ Multiples for YYZ Books. He is co-founder of Nothing Else Press, which has published projects by Jonathan Monk, David Shrigley, Paul Butler and others.