Exhibitions

This video installation explores both the aesthetics of chinoiserie and the notion of ornamental decoration as a meeting point between East and West. The work’s figurative/fanciful language of floral wallpaper motifs serves to underscore this cultural crossbreeding. Engaging viewers in an inclusive, rather than simply contemplative experience, it calls into question their relationship with the work; the installation’s visual grammar, in a state of constant flux, serves to magnify the work’s stereoscopic and kaleidoscopic effects, constructing a metaphor of acculturation.

Plunged in darkness, the three walls with their projected images thus form a visual enclosure—wallpaper—whose dynamic and symmetrical motifs compress the space of viewers. Keeping them at the centre, it envelops them with visual material while transforming the architecture of the site, giving it both texture and volume. Isolated from the exterior world, the viewer undergoes an intense experience of total immersion.

The artist’s visual score transforms itself in a concatenation of formal sequences, each disappearing one after the other and replaced by new configurations: overlapping floral hybrid forms. The floral motif is significant for the artist, for he photographed his own garden, rearranging the images in film sequences that imitate the blossoming cycle.  

These fragmented and animated flowers endlessly multiple their decorative “charms,” inevitably attracting the eye. Overwhelmed by this ornamental beauty, the visitor cannot help but be delighted, enchanted—and above all excited by so many harmonious optical attractions. Attempting to free themselves from the shapeless vacuity of the site, these floral compositions, whether alone or in clusters, vibrate to the throbbing rhythms of the non-stop images. In a succession of countless arabesques, they depict an invented botanical taxonomy which, although simply an imitation of natural flora, is given verisimilitude through computer graphics, creating the illusion that it is living wallpaper. A visual chassé-croisé orchestrated from the outset, the work unleashes a symphony of decorative motifs to evoke the acculturation and taming of nature.

Karl-Gilbert Murray, Curator

A video installation by Ed Pien, presented by the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) and the Cinémathèque québécoise as part of the Special Events Series presented by Loto-Québec.

Opening: March 15th, 5 P.M.

FREE ENTRANCE