BGL, Pascal Grandmaison, Adad Hannah, Karen Tam at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada)

BGL/Pascal Grandmaison/Adad Hannah/Karen Tam exhibition
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
October 8, 2010 to January 2, 2011

In conjunction with the exhibition 2010 Sobey Art Award, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is presenting works by the four Québec semifinalists – BGL, Pascal Grandmaison, Adad Hannah and Karen Tam – also nominated for this year’s award. The show features a selection of their recent works chosen by Lesley Johnstone, curator at the Musée and member of the Curatorial Panel for the 2010 Sobey Art Award.

The BGL collective is primarily known for its large-scale site-specific installations and performances combining humour, irony, and social and political commentary. Often using found and recycled materials, their installations are about both work and play, and address such topical issues as deforestation and ecology, unbridled consumerism and material waste.

Pascal Grandmaison’s films and still photographs are meditations on time, duration and visual perception. His subjects are the structures and tools of the photographer or filmmaker and, perhaps most importantly, light itself. In works that are nearly always black and white, he makes us think about how we see.

Adad Hannah transposes historical paintings and sculptures into videos and photographs, interrogating the codes, conventions and temporal dimensions of each of these media. Here he investigates Rodin’s famous sculpture The Burghers of Calais.

Karen Tam’s works centre on the history of the Chinese diaspora, the infiltration of chinoiserie into the North American aesthetic and the continuing, conflicted relationships between East and West.