power play

Philippe Allard (Montréal)

 

Production Residency and presentation
December 10 -22, 2012

Reception: Wednesday December 12 from 5pm to 7pm

 

For a two weeks period, Philippe Allard will work at articule to the production and installation Power Play, a new project that highlights economic instability by transforming a material that’s usually used to serve political ends. The gallery will remain open to the public who will have the opportunity to participate and discuss with the artist about the project and the materials being used : credit cards and electoral signs.

 

With this project, Philippe Allard will put the ultimate symbol of consumerism, the credit card, in a precarious situation - illustrating the economic reality of a world of persons who have scant resources at their disposal and so turn to salvaged materials and found objects.

 

Strips of printed – and therefore non-recyclable - choroplast form rectilinear pictorial compositions that all seem to be the same but for their makeshift frames, which have also been recycled. Identity is lost and the tableau de-sanctified. The election sign, instead of invading the public sphere, is here reduced to shreds and silenced, made uniform, cut off from its political party, so that its allegiances are confounded.

 

A partition runs between the two worlds of the credit card and the election sign, through which we can barely see. Does this serve as a tenuous link between two realities or does it merely obscure communication between power, it’s so called transparency, and the people? Unpopular politics are digested in this series of tableaux that also strangely resembles a series of family portraits.

 

Since receiving his bachelors degree in Graphic Design from UQAM, Philippe Allard has been creating sculptures and large installations. By recycling mass-produced materials, he produces works that are usually overscaled.

For the last ten years, he has been part of several solo and group exhibitions in Montreal and Europe, showing a particular interest for site-specific interventions. He has produced numerous works of public art, amongst which the sculptures The contortionist for Cirque du Soleil in 2004, and Resistance for the city of Contrecoeur in 2010. He was the winner of the Place des Arts’ public art contest in 2009 alongside Justin Duchesneau, with the installation Arc-en-ciel. In spring 2013 Allard will present a new large work for the fair Papier13 as well as Pissenlit in Laval’s Lausanne Park, his first work that will be created in the context of the integration of art and architecture programme.

 

www.all-art.ca