This year, Art's Birthday is organic! And, our Art is digital and opaque, created in the image of the choices we have made in our networked lives.
Thank you to Studio XX for hosting my visit on this 17th day of January, 2008.
My name is Pascale Malaterre, I am a Québecois artist, and a Montrealer. Like many Montreal-based Québecers, I was born very far from Montreal, where I grew up.
I
offer you my video-poem --
the writing style is a testament to my Orient and is dedicated to our erotic
grandmothers, our fighting mothers and that part of us, that protected part
of us, that goes on to be transmitted throughout the vast human garden we call
The World.
Note: You must place place a mirror in front of your computer to read the video.
Thanks to Alexandra Cloutier, a poet-sculptor from Québec City who loaned me her Parisian apartment while she lives in mine in Montreal, I met her neighbour Pierrick. He is the founder and the life behind La petite chouette, a place which lodges artists, illegals, philosophers and poets as well as an association which disseminates Art while distributing organic bio baskets. And all, for a small sum of money. He photographs people and on bio basket Saturdays, he exhibits this chain of human faces at this place.
Note: Pierrick refuses to reveal his last name.
The bio basket is simple: a bio buyer is responsible and in contact with a bio producer who knows in advance to whom he will provide bread, eggs, vegetables and meat, all of which are antibiotic and pesticide free. It' is less expensive for the citizen -- this strategy was put into effect by Russian anarchists to fight against a new kind of proletariat misery born in the cities!
Note: the name of this anarchistic Russian author is unknown.
For January 17th, I asked the artists participating in these bio baskets to give me their works for exhibition: Karin Combi: a photo-montage. Karin is a Parisian whose Asian mother is from the island of Mauritius. Karin knows Montreal. She bicycled to a suburb not far from Paris (Porte de Pantin) to take this photograph, which reminds her of Montreal, allowing her cultural heritage to seep through.
Note: The actual setting of this photograph is unrecognizable.
Armand Lecomte, architect, draws his nude partner, while she sleeps or reads. Following our encounter, deciding to trust me, he will exhibit these intimate drawings, each sketched out in one stroke. He accepted they be viewed in this organic bio basket exchange, in the context of Art's Birthday.
Note: He refuses to have his drawings shown in close-up on the web.
Olfa Driss, a Quebecois Montreal artist of Tunisian origin with whom I had the great joy of exhibiting at La Centrale last summer, shows us in her own style as a New Media artist, her visions of a North American winter landscape.
Note: To her, these photographs are exotic.
Happy Art's Birthday! Transparent, opaque and organic!