Canal Lachine

Just the idea of organising a recurring exhibition of in situ sculpture in historical urban sites is very promising. I have always had a fondness for contemporary artworks placed outside the ivory towers that are the museums and galleries, for exhibitions called "hors-les murs (outside the walls)" and the projects that attempt to combine art and life. These are projects that require artists to go out into the streets and temporarily install their works in nature or in functional spaces - vacant or still active - and that compel them to speak about both the nature of their artwork and its location.

It should be understood that this kind of truant artwork has little in common with works that are "integrated into architecture" despite their appearance. These artworks are made with complete liberty and are not required to satisfy all the demands of architects, engineers, contractors or "users", to whose eyes the aesthetic and critical considerations have little importance. From this point of view, the works that I am talking about are most likely to take a healthy critical stance in comparison to the "public artworks" in our landscape.

Artefact 2001 is on a fruitful course, and I beleive that the choice of the site alone almost guarantees the project's success. A few past events of this nature that have left a lasting impression are Lyne Lapointe and Martha Fleming's installations from 1982 to 1995 in Montreal and elsewhere in the world; the exhibition Fictions, in 1989 (a collaboration between Jérôme Sans and Annie Molin Vasseur), in which twenty-five artists took over public spaces at Mirabel Airport for three months; the immense Skulptur Projekte in Münster, in 1987; and most recently, Jan Hoet's project in Gant, Over the Edges, in which about sixty artists were invited to create works that would interact with the city...

The Lachine Canal, with its glorious past and its imminent renaissance, is an ideal theme on a perfect site. It in itself is a large enough artefact that ten artists from various generations, backgrounds and aesthetics can set up here for a few months. They will have to find an innovative way to fit into the Canal's complex restoration. This is to say that the work initially will be concerned with the Canal's history or the archaeology of this type of infrastructure in order to become a fiction, a form that to a large extent can be called "poetic". At first sight, all kinds of works can be expected, from the most spectacular to the most discreet, from the most physical to the most immaterial.

Gilles Daigneault
Art Historian and art critic