Longueuil, Canada

Longueuil, Canada

Since 2019, the City of Longueuil has been hosting PASSAGES INSOLITES artworks on tour.

Consult the 2022 programmation

These works were initially created for the public art circuit PASSAGES INSOLITES in Quebec City, designed by EXMURO and presented by the City of Quebec. This project is made possible by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

 

 

2022

  • Benedetto Bufalino, Lawn cars
Credits: Jean-Michel Seminaro

In the utopian vision of a world where the automobile has become obsolete, a series of three parked cars are turned upside down, filled with earth and covered with an immaculate lawn that is just waiting to be sunbathed or picnicked on. Street parking is thus discarded to make way for a place of conviviality and greening of the public space.

For Benedetto Bufalino, the common places of the everyday life are playgrounds favorable to shifted rereadings of the reality and rearrangements of the urbanity to subvert the perceptions. By turning the car upside down to divert its use, the artist proposes a kind of desacralization of this omnipresent object that has radically transformed our way of life in the contemporary city. The gesture of recovery and sustainable reallocation of this icon of consumerism also refers to the criticism of productivism, the ecological emergency and the reappropriation of public space.

Benedetto Bufalino lives and works in Lyon, France. In the course of his artistic career, which has focused on the creation of ephemeral installations in public space, he has participated in numerous events and festivals, including Un Été au Havre, Nuit Blanche and Voyage à Nantes in France, as well as the Landscape Festival Praha in the Czech Republic and Concéntrico: International Architecture and Design Festival in Spain. Bufalino’s work has also been featured in many prestigious institutions including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon and the National Museum of Singapore.

This work was conceived and presented as part of PASSAGES INSOLITES 2021.
  • Valérie Potvin, The Sculptor Herself
Credits: Jean-Michel Seminaro

A grandiose statuesque figure emerges in the city like a heroine brandishing her weapons. The female effigy wears a work cover and is equipped with a hammer, a tool typically used in sculpture. By highlighting the attributes of studio work, the representation emphasizes the labor and technical know-how involved in creation.

In a highly evocative mise en abyme, it is the artist who created the work who is self-represented. Valérie Potvin thus makes a gesture of affirmation and valorization of her own status as an artist. The work also underpins a discourse demanding better recognition of women artists in the sculptural discipline, which remains largely dominated by men. Stoic and unshakeable on its base, the monument of immaculate white also pays homage to the strength of women and their undeniable place in the practice of public art.

Valérie Potvin lives and works in sculpture and installation between Canada and Germany. She holds an interdisciplinary master’s degree in art and a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Université Laval. She is a recipient of the René-Richard Bursary, the Première Ovation program in visual arts, media arts and crafts and a finalist for the Prix Videre Création in visual arts. In addition to having exhibited her work in Brazil, the United States and Europe, she has been selected for the Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine de Trois-Rivières, the Art Souterrain event in Montreal and the Festival Kunst am Spreeknie in Schöneweide, Germany.

This work was conceived and presented as part of PASSAGES INSOLITES 2021.
  • King of the Mountain, Charles-Étienne Brochu
Credits: Jean-Michel Seminaro

At first glance, King of the Mountain appears to be a simple, colorful and playful house of cards. On closer inspection, however, the work reveals its ambivalence: there are scenes of collaboration, resilience and poetry, but also more dramatic images, sometimes suggesting tension or even a breaking point.

Erected on the site of the Greenfield Park borough office, the work is fragile and ephemeral in appearance, contrasting with the building’s unshakeable appearance. It is a metaphor for a society in a precarious balance between its values of democracy, citizen voice and cooperation and its more superficial, individual and even self-destructive aspirations. The work also represents the duality that characterizes all of our institutions, both precious and fragile yet vigorous and resilient.

One thing is certain, when building a house of cards, one must remain vigilant. A single gust of wind, tremor or sudden movement could shatter the construction and the whole thing would have to be started again. But, despite appearances and following the example of Quebec society, this house of cards will resist and not fall…

Charles-Étienne Brochu’s work is situated halfway between illustration and visual arts. His abundant practice revolves around digital drawing, animation, 3D modeling and collage. The artist imagines colorful worlds and stages multiple stories that are both amusing and ambivalent and that challenge the observer’s eye. The artist evokes the complexity of the world and human relationships, these contradictions that sometimes animate us.

This work was conceived and presented as part of PASSAGES INSOLITES 2020.

2021

  • Marie-Eve Martel (Blainville), Space Cube

Inspired by iconography and symbolism, Space Cube invites spectators to discover an imaginary world, somewhere between the organic and the geometric, hidden inside its walls. Peering through the “magic eye” reveals a hybrid city that imperfectly reflects the outside while multiplying versions of its own reflection inside.

This is Marie-Eve Martel’s third participation in Passages Insolites, after her work Cube Spatial (Space Cube) was shown in 2017 and 2018.

This artwork was produced and presented for PASSAGES INSOLITES 2017, 2018 et 2019. 

Credits : Jean-Michel Seminaro

Inspired by iconography and symbolism, Space Cube invites spectators to discover an imaginary world, somewhere between the organic and the geometric, hidden inside its walls. Peering through the “magic eye” reveals a hybrid city that imperfectly reflects the outside while multiplying versions of its own reflection inside.

This artwork was produced and created for PASSAGES INSOLITES 2018.
Crédits : Jean-Michel Seminaro

 

2019

In partnership with the Ville de Longueuil, four works have been shown as part of SAM (Sommet des arts et de la musique)

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