Plan Large
Quartier Éphémère places artists’ interventions in the city at the heart of its bustling activities.
Plan Large is an event that aims to improve the urban environment and the dynamic of a neighbourhood through the presence of art. Three photographers empower three abandoned illuminated billboards, diverted from their original function as advertising by giant photographs. From the Bonaventure highway and the railway tracks, millions of commuters can admire the illuminated pieces every as their enter and leave the city.
The artists were selected based on the context and the immediate environment for the location of the panels.
Plan Large 2009
Shelley Miller et Michael Flomen
presented in collaboration with le Mois de la Photo à Montréal
With his photogram The Blue Flyer II (2009), Michael Flomen renews the visual experiences of the pioneers of photography. Using photosensitive paper but no camera, he has captured the twinkling of fireflies at night. Their luminosity impregnates the surface of the paper, creating haphazard traces composed of phosphorescent points of light. Working as closely as possible to nature, Flomen reveals its imperceptible details and associates them with coloured tones. Located on a large scale billboard in the core of Montreal, the resulting image of an abstract and microcosmic landscape blends in with the urban landscape.The artwork was damaged by strong winds in 2011.
The work of Shelley Miller reflects her fascination for the adornment of facades and the architecture of buildings. She uses inexpensive materials in her artistic research, moving away from their domestic and primary uses to elevate their stature or to mask their reality. The principal material of her artistic creation is that of powdered sugar. The project exhibited for Plan large is the result of her research that was started during a trip to Brazil where she presented an installation of tiles made of sugar in the public arena, resembling that of Portuguese ceramic tiles. The Cargo installation similar to that of a large ceramic mural, which is in reality made from sugar, depicts boats from the 15th Century, giving allusion to that of the weighty colonial past and the slavery of the sugar cane cultures. in evoking the temporal, the perishable materials show the futility of modern times, disappearing little by little under the soil and the rain.
Shelley Miller, Fringe, 2009
Michael Flomen, The Blue Flyer II
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Plan Large 2007
Rebecca Belmore and Ron Terada
presented in collaboration with le Mois de la Photo à Montréal
As of October 4th, the 4th edition of PLAN LARGE, a wide opencast photographic gallery, presents two new forceful works, leaving a significant mark in Montreal’s urban landscape. Rebecca Belmore (Vancouver), with the soft violence of Fringe, strikes with the inherent tension of the subject in its environment; across a woman’s back is drawn a scar, sown together by red pearls. Native of the Anishinabekwe Nation, the artist evokes in this peace the violence against native peoples, and specifically women, as well as their reinsertion as craftswomen and men. The artwork is no longer presented (since 2011). Ron Terada (Vancouver) also reveals sensitive grounds connected to identity with the controversial piece See Other Side of Sign, which appears as a nonsense in a bare landscape. Isolated in its absurdity, See Other Side Of Sign still manages to spark polemic.
Rebecca Belmore, Fringe, 2007, 2.44m x 7.32m, à l'angle des rues Duke et Ottawa
Ron Terada, See Other Side of Sign, détail, 2006, 1.8m x 1.8m, 956 rue Ottawa
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Plan large 2006
The in-situ project Plan Large will recommence with the presentation of two shocking images: the Sanchez Brothers provoke furtive glances with a close-up of three howling wolves, about to wage an attack. These vibrant realistic images, frozen moments of extreme tension, of violence contained or discharged, are privileged by the two artists originally from Laval. Elena Willis is a young Montreal photographer, whose photos always implicate characters confronted by nature's power. The scenes show ampleness of space and submission of the characters absorbed by its immensity. Here, she presents an image of a woman assailed by a tempestuous wave from which she tries to defend herself.
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Plan large 2003
In 1999, Milutin Gubash began to collect and systematically study divers articles in a daily newspaper published in Calgary, Alberta, the city of his birth. In the same way that it has for the past four years, this web project uses the contents of these archives as a material resource and a source of inspiration. Throughout this period, the diverse facets of this project in their entirety have brought the artist to reconsider photography genres such as, the narrative, monumental, documentary and landscape. www.iprojects.org/tragedies
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Plan large 2001
Présentées de septembre à décembre 2001 au coin des rues Duke et Ottawa à Montréal, ces trois interventions in situ sur panneaux publicitaires abandonnés faisaient partie intégrante du Mois de la Photo
Presented from September to December 2001, on the corner of Duke and Ottawa street in Montreal these three interventions on abandoned billboards were apart of the Mois de la Photo (The Month of the Photo).
BELDUM XVIII (1998-1999) Photomontage 8’ X 24’ (2.44m x 7.32m)
Neil Budzinski photographs industrial relics and traces of history that he juxtaposes and superimposes in a manner that constitutes a utopian montage essentially removed from any context or reference. The photomontage Bedlum no 18, segments an ancient mill located in Pennsylvania that he managed to capture little of before its demolition. The artist wanted to present a machine in a sculptural and architectural form by accentuating its metallic structures that entangle themselves, punctuated with a full or open volume.
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Isabelle Hayeur
Isabelle Hayeur defies the creative process of traditional photography and conceives her images uniquely through montage on computer. Station is an artificial landscape created with the aide of information technology making reference to the localization of the Cité du Multimédia. This image shows an isolated building at the edge of water, a desolated and austere landscapes surrounds it that hesitates between the industrial and the post card.
Station (2001) Photomontage 7’ X 30’ (2.13m x 9,15m)
Station shows an isolated building close to sprawling water and a road. The image is ambiguous: at times austere, desolate and banal but also theatrical and dramatic. She evokes a vacation landscape as well as a non-space. In a landscape that hesitates between the zone and the postcard, it is maybe a hotel at the tip of the ocean or an office building in an industrial park.
http://isabelle-hayeur.com
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Alexandra Sà
With her work Singing in the Box, Alexandra Sà proposes an image on the theme of displacement. Cornered in a cardboard box, a woman sings, manifesting in vain her presence under this imposing, loud super-structure. Facing the Ville-Marie highway, angled towards a busy crossroad, this image symbolizes with humour the presence of humanity in the invasive urban context.
SINGING IN THE BOX (2001) | Photography 70” X 140” (1.78m X 3.56m)
Alexandra Sà takes her inspiration from the city and its dwellers. From the direction of performance, video, intervention and activism, she seeks to enter in dialogue with them. She usually works within open spaces, often urban, where she presents evoking situations that question and jostle certain normative behavior in our society to the passers-by
