Guest curator Gilles Daigneault has organised this exhibition as an introduction to the upcoming outside event. Giving free rein to their imagination, the artists were invited to create "Utopian Projects for the Lachine Canal" in the form of drawings, prints, photographic assemblages and scale models.

According to Gilles Daigneault, "the exhibition has indeed developed from Artefact 2001. Works by the same artists - Jean-Pierre Aubé, Pierre Bourgault, Herménégilde Chiasson, Cozic, Michel de Broin, Michelle Héon, Marie-Chrystine Landry, Francine Larivée and Michel Saulnier - are assembled around a similar theme: the Lachine Canal. The exhibition will give the public a taste of the first edition of the ephemeral, in situ sculpture triennial organised by the Centre de diffusion 3D; however, it is a separate exhibition and ultimately could exist without the outside interventions along the canal.

To briefly recall the facts: Artefact 2001 asked the above-mentioned artists to momentarily consider a part of the Lachine Canal that for a few months is still in a "state of hibernation" like a large found object - an artefact, to be exact. The artists are to occupy and transform a part of the canal, taking into account its physical aspects such as the banks, the water, the bridges and walkways spanning it, the buildings bordering on it, its long history and also the archaeology of this kind of infrastructure. In any case, they must find an original way to create and integrate a poetic installation within the canal's complex restoration. We can already see that the exercise will produce very personal and unusual fictions, but yet the works must be feasible, they must be created despite all sorts of inevitable constraints.

At the Maison de la culture however, the works are in a smaller format - the main constraint for the artists here (outside the usual budgetary issues) - and must present a utopian project for the same site. A project that concerns the same complex reality as Artefact 2001 but which, in contrast, is expressed with complete disregard for any production constraints because it will never be carried out. We can already sense that this group of works will be a liberating venture in relation to the Triennial works, which inevitably are more realistic. They will also give future visitors to the site a stimulating prelude, some thoughts on the relationship between liberty and control, poetics and politics, pure imagination and ingenuity and so on. All this will be documented and developed in the section of the Artefact 2001 catalogue concerning this counterpoint to the main event.

There were no constraints on the "admissible" disciplines: the projects could be drawings, prints, photographs, collage, digital images, scale models, small sculptures, texts, etc.

In short, these two exhibitions complement each other on paper like a dream and reality. But because these two spheres constantly influence each other in life, there is a risk they may happily subvert this dichotomy in our diptych as well.