Le Vaisseau / Solid Void : Report back

The exhibition Le Vaisseau / Solid Void, curated by Esther Bourdages, at Darling Foundry, ended last August 25^th. It presented works by local artist Virginie Laganière.

Thanks to Dr Gascia OUZOUNIAN (Queen's University, Belfast) for sharing the following short review with .dpi!

This exhibition constructs an environment that casts a critical eye on architectural remnants of the Soviet era or on the influence of the modernism of the 1960s to the 1980s, as testimonies to the scope of the aspirations associated with that era’s political project, and conversely, to disenchantment upon their failure.

I’m very grateful to Esther Bourdages for showing a group of us around the brilliant exhibit she curated at Fonderie Darling: 'Virginie Laganière: Le Vaisseau/Solid Void'.

This is a wonderful show in a wonderful space, and both the artist and curator do justice to a subject that could, by lesser hands, easily veer towards the cold or distant. In Le Vaisseau, each piece is prepared, selected, and presented with utmost attention to detail: the colours and resolution of the prints are astounding, and the strange mix of harsh, concrete realism and aspirational Futurism of Brutalist architecture comes to life in a way that any initiate -- or even the most hard done by survivor of post-War monumentalism -- can appreciate. The exhibit comes equipped with no less than a bunker-style Soviet Brutalist chill-out-zone-slash-sound-installation. If you find yourself in Montréal's Griffintown, do go!