Emmanuel Galland and François Lalumière borrow from photography, sculpture, and collage to play with urban architectural space in their installation, Invert Me Out.
Architecturally, the building that houses both articule and the paint store La Maison du peintre is symmetrical – the two halves almost a mirror image, in fact. Now Galland and Lalumière have replicated the paint store’s façade within the “frame” of articule, creating an almost perfect three-dimensional facsimile. It’s as if the paint store has doubled in size – either that or the props from a film shoot have been put on display.
Using recycled materials, every element of the shop window and its contents (signage, advertisements, paint brushes, neon lights, the grill, etc.) has been faithfully reproduced only in reverse (copy, paste, and flip). Playing with notions of shift and reinterpretation, all the objects that the artists have recreated are wrapped in white Duct Tape; branding, colour, and script, thus masked, have been effaced. As visual recycling, all is artificial: Galland and Lalumière do not claim to create realistic trompe l’oeil.
With Invert Me Out the artists negotiate slippages between the original and the copy, the familiar and the strange, construction and renovation, heritage and preservation, reality and record, magic and trickery, fact and memory, truth and deception.
As well as being an artist / curator, Emmanuel Galland works as a consultant in the field of culture and communication. Having studied fine art and art history at the Université de Montréal, he has gone on to exhibit photographs and installations in Quebec’s artist-run centres and museums and elsewhere. His work has won prizes and can be found in several collections. Galland is very active in Montreal’s art milieu and was involved at the Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK, l’Espace Vidéographe, MUTEK, and the MAI. A period of hyperactivity towards the end of the 20th Century was followed by several fallow seasons. Then, fusing his skills, he began working as a consultant with a number of artists and cultural organisations and events. He is a co-founder of the MTL ART MAP [www.pavilionprojects.com/map]. Galland’s varied path could be said to be characterised by a tendency towards building relationships and never being where one expects to find him.
François Lalumière’s collages, installations, sculptures, and urban interventions have one common element: Duct Tape, a medium he employs in a broad spectrum of colours. Interested in environmental concerns, Lalumière draws on various art-historical references with a particular interest in pictorialism and formalism. Influenced by geometric abstraction and the decorative arts, he is equally inspired by primitive motifs and aboriginal iconographies. Lalumière is interested in contemporary creation in its broadest sense, and he has worked in design and in the fashion milieu with the likes of Denis Gagnon, Azamit, and Yso; he has also worked for the VOIR weekly paper. Following an exhibition at the FOFA Gallery, Lalumière presented CONTREBANDE / CONTRABAND - accompanied by a publication - at the VAV Gallery. He is currently studying Studio Arts at Concordia University.
The artists wish to thank: Peintures Miller – La Maison du Peintre, TREDICI, Antonin Sorel - KEZACO, AXENÉO7, Caroline Hayeur – Agence Stock Photo, l’Écocentre de La Petite-Patrie, Debna, Siphay Southidara, Robbin Deyo, Florian Brucker, Clément de Gaulejac, Charlotte Sordes.
