Monika Kin Gagnon – författare

Expo 67 tient une large place dans notre mémoire collective, mais la nostalgie en fait souvent un événement lointain, occultant les circonstances qui ont permis ce moment culturel exceptionnel. Pensons notamment à la remarquable liberté avec laquelle créateurs, artistes, architectes, cinéastes et concepteurs ont expérimenté des techniques et des formes nouvelles et proposé des produits culturels d''une diversité étonnante. Corollaire de l''exposition présentée par le Musée d''art contemporain en 2017, À la recherche d''Expo 67 regroupe des œuvres de dix-neuf artistes et des essais inédits qui sondent les liens entre archives et mémoire. La présentation thématique fait dialoguer des œuvres, des mots et des photos d''archives qui restituent des aspects vitaux de l''événement. Des textes et des images de Marie-Claire Blais, Pascal Grandmaison et Cheryl Sim font ressortir l''aspect physique des îles créées de toutes pièces pour l''exposition, tandis que d''autres réinventent ou rappellent des lieux essentiels, comme les pavillons du Canada et des Indiens du Canada. En effet, Expo 67 modifie la perception des Autochtones du Canada au pays et à l''étranger, alors même que l''indigénéité donne lieu à de nouvelles conceptions politiques et culturelles. Dans cet esprit, Duane Linklater renvoie à Earth Mother and Her Children (Terre-Mère et ses enfants), peinture murale de Norval Morrisseau et œuvre phare de l''événement, tandis que Krista Belle Stewart reconstruit un photogramme d''un bref documentaire de l''Office national du film sur la vie des Autochtones en recouvrant de vinyle une « forme coloniale typique » : la fenêtre à seize carreaux. Quelques œuvres reprennent les éléments clés de certains pavillons à l''aide de médias et d''outils numériques contemporains pour faire revivre l''expérience proposée naguère. Janine Marchessault retrace l''histoire du film à Expo 67 et la difficulté d''archiver ces productions. Le livre traite aussi de six films multiécrans grand format de l''exposition. Une œuvre contemporaine cinématographique de Jacqueline Hoàng Nguy?n, Geronimo Inutiq, Philip Hoffman et Eva Kolcze fouille la mémoire officielle d''Expo 67 et les différents récits sur l''événement. Il en résulte une vision critique et inventive qui montre à quel point l''expérience paraît aussi fondamentale plus de cinquante ans plus tard et qui souligne le rôle de la recherche et de la création dans l''examen et la perpétuation de la mémoire culturelle. Brillamment illustré d''œuvres d''art originales et enrichi de documents d''archives, écrits et visuels, À la recherche d''Expo 67 redonne vie à ce moment utopique de l''histoire de Montréal, vibrant de tensions inattendues et d''une immense créativité.

Though Expo 67 looms large in our collective memory, it is often remembered nostalgically as a remote historical event. The conditions that made Expo an exceptional cultural moment are often forgotten: remarkable creative freedom was granted to artists, architects, filmmakers, and designers to experiment with technology and new forms, resulting in an incredible diversity of cultural production. Originating with the Musée d''art contemporain''s 2017 exhibition, In Search of Expo 67 brings together original work from nineteen artists and new critical essays to explore the connections between archives and memory. Organized thematically, artists'' words and works are put into dialogue with archival imagery that reconstructs key aspects of the original event. Works by Marie-Claire Blais and Pascal Grandmaison as well as Cheryl Sim explore the physicality of the artificially constructed Expo islands while texts and images rethink and remember key locales such as the Canada and Indians of Canada Pavilions. Expo influenced ideas about Indigenous Canadians at home and abroad at the advent of a new political and cultural conceptualization of Indigeneity: Duane Linklater''s art reimagines Norval Morrisseau''s seminal Expo mural Earth Mother and Her Children, while Krista Belle Stewart reconstructs a single frame of a short NFB documentary about Indigenous life in vinyl over a "classic colonial grid" of sixteen window panes. Artworks employ contemporary digital media and tools to explore key elements and experiences of particular pavilions. Janine Marchessault provides a history of film at Expo and its archival difficulties. The book also documents six original multi-screen large-format films from Expo 67. Contemporary work in film by Jacqueline Hoàng Nguy?n, Geronimo Inutiq, and Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze interrogates the official memory and narratives of Expo 67. The result is a critical rethinking and creative reimagining of Expo that shows how vital it remains over fifty years after it occurred, and the role of both research and creation in questioning and sustaining cultural memory. Brilliantly illustrated with original artworks and archival documents and images, In Search of Expo 67 revitalizes this utopian moment in Montreal''s history as a site of unexpected tensions and immense creativity.

Known for her expansive multidisciplinary approach to art making Vancouver-based Dana Claxton, who is Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux), has investigated notions of Indigenous identity, beauty, gender and the body, as well as broader social and political issues through a practice which encompasses photography, film, video and performance. Rooted in contemporary art strategies, her practice critiques the representations of Indigenous people that circulate in art, literature and popular culture in general. In doing so, Claxton regularly combines Lakota traditions with “Western” influences, using a powerful and emotive “mix, meld and mash” approach to address the oppressive legacies of colonialism and to articulate Indigenous world views, histories and spirituality. This timely catalogue will be the first monograph to examine the full breadth and scope of Claxton’s practice. It will be extensively illustrated and will include essays by Claxton’s colleague Jaleh Mansoor, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia; Monika Kin Gagnon, Professor in the Communications Department at Concordia University, who has followed Claxton’s work for 25 years; Olivia Michiko Gagnon, a New York–based scholar and doctoral student in Performance Studies; and Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

A personal and intimate perspective on one of Canada's most prominent 20th century multidisciplinary artists, who was once described as "abstraction’s poet-philosopher."Charles Gagnon (1934–2003) was a painter, photographer and filmmaker considered by many to be an important figure in Quebec and Canadian art in the 20th century.His early career emerged alongside the American Abstract Expressionists and his growing multidisciplinary practice broke away from the singularity of painting shared by his Montreal contemporaries of the Automatistes and the Plasticiens. The complexity and depth of his work as a painter, photographer, and filmmaker was distinguished by a probing, introspective quality. His paintings were simultaneously rigid and free-flowing, with self-imposed rules and structure contrasted by rich fracture and gestural brush work. Across all disciplines he played with multiple levels of perception, and many works evoke the liminal space of the threshold, or multi-plane spaces.In Charles Gagnon: The Colour of Time, the Sound of Space, this long-standing multidisciplinary work is brought into full view with texts that explore Gagnon’s various practices, from painting to photography to film. An English-language essay by art historian and curator Roald Nasgaard chronicles Gagnon’s artistic evolution from his early years in New York in the 1950s to his final productive years in the late 1990s in Quebec, and situates him within an expanded international historical context of artists, artworks, and art movements. Filmmaker and professor Olivier Asselin’s French-language essay engages Gagnon’s use of different media, including the role of sound and music in his artworks. Michiko Yajima Gagnon, the wife of the late artist, gives insight into the inseparability of everyday life and Charles’s creative undertakings: his friendships with other artists (Tōru Takemitsu, Lee Friedlander), travel (to New York, Japan, and, particularly, the American Southwest), and the relationship between the landscapes surrounding his studios and his artwork.Featuring more than 250 art reproductions and archival images, Charles Gagnon is an intimate portrait of an artist and the celebration of a life’s work.