Residency : from March 9 to 12, 2010
Opening : Friday March 12, at 5pm
Upon entering the gallery, you find yourself in the middle of a floating forest. Metal tubes topped with pails create vertical alignments in the space. Crumpled sheets of aluminum become foliage above these structures. Steel wires anchored to the wall ensure the trees’ equilibrium. When you approach a tree, it lights up and reveals the image that roots it to the ground. You need to explore the whole forest to allow every tree to manifest itself.
Though the artist is inspired by the forests of Northern Ontario, his installation is also a reference to all of the world’s forests. Each tree representing one corner of the world occupies its space harmoniously in the artist’s utopian universe.
However, there is also tension. The steel wires that stretch horizontally between the trees and the gallery walls recall the severe environmental problems humankind has created.
In a video projection, utility poles, trees and lampposts fly past at high speeds between Kapuskasing and Sudbury. These vertical objects in motion might dispel the sense of discomfort by providing a temporary exit.
Sponsor
This exhibition is sponsored by Le Loup 98,9 and La voix du nord.
Normand Fortin
Normand Fortin is a visual artist. His art is his research, his quest, his questions, his explorations, his discoveries. Normand Fortin is a sculptor, painter and performance and installation artist. His art is his imagined life. It takes imagination to tame the works of Normand Fortin, whose inspiration draws from the various sources of daily life as well as from the slightly more ethereal spheres of his spirituality. The tension of opposites as well as the balances which are essential in this constant duality occupy the vast spaces composing the memory and the profoundly childish and liberating gesture. His themes are multiple: love, parent-child relationships, elements, colour, shape and line. The work is part of the environment, the environment is part of the work. First imagined, it becomes a representation that embraces the environment, occupying the space discreetly and with dignity. From the drawing board until its coming into the world, the work settles permanently in the geography of the moment. The work constitutes a memory as Normand Fortin's instinct possesses a memory, its own history. The place of creation also has its past, its memory and its ancestry. Ditto for the material which also has its memory in situ. The work of the artist will appeal to them. All these combined materials, these probed memories and these revealed stories will constitute the thematic whole of an even greater history, of a greater memory, perhaps better, which can in turn access other values always and endlessly transcendent. A hope.
Artist Profile