Laurent Montaron Everything is accidental

Aryen Hoekstra Choreography for Screen

Opening reception: Friday 5 September at 7:30

Artists' talk: Friday 5 September at 6:30PM

4 September to 25 October 2014

Laurent Montaron Everything is accidental

The work of Laurent Montaron b. 1972, lives and works in Paris is suffused with the contemporary history of the media. For Montaron, a compulsive exploration of technologies and technological experimentation is a means to explore how we think through tools and objects, and find essence in the sense of things. Alchemy, childhood memories, astrology, pre-Socratic Greek philosophies, physical conditions and technological systems are combined, gathering the means of representation, photography, film, installation and sculpture, in considered installations which make evident the paradoxes of representation and thought. The activity of projection is not enclosed in the black box space; this projection is made visible in multiple modes which populate our everyday, Montaron insists no image can be dissociated from the way it has been made.

Everything is accidental is the North-American premiere of Montarons new film work Nature of the Self 2014, produced during his residency at the French Academy in Rome, presented in a vitrine-like installation and with a new sculptural work.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with TIFF as part of the Future Projections programme and in partnership with the Consulate General of France in Toronto.

Aryen Hoekstra Choreography for Screen

The screen as both apparatus and space of political potential is central to the work of Aryen Hoekstra b. 1982 Edmonton, lives and works in Toronto. In his film and sculptural installations, Hoekstra proposes a disjuncture in the passages of time and concepts of progress inherent in modernity. Juxtaposing digital and analogue means he explores the potential of slippage to question the authority of the image.

Choreography for Screen aligns eye and body. Referencing the height of Hollywoods classic era; the films of collective choreographed dance and song with Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers and Rita Hayworth, their cultural role is progressively abstracted. A 16mm film sequence captures sequins on a piece of fabric, as opposed to a segue into an epic dance routine, its continuous looping flickers like a light play on water or aerial nighttime surveillance. The global backdrop of the 1940s manifests, choreographed movements, rather than dance, become abstractions of troop deployments, delineations of enemy lines, and the screen as a space of propaganda.

Originating in the formal and conceptual language of the moving-image, Hoekstra identifies the relationship between image and darkness as a site of radical potentiality. He examines the effects of the screen-ic mediation of moving-images on the shaping of behaviour, gesture and thought throughout modernity and the spectre thus cast upon our contemporary condition.

Choreography for Screen is Hoekstras first solo exhibition in Canada.