Art in Montreal

Anne-Marie Proulx's Être jardin at Vox was curated by Marie J. Jean with Dominique Mousseau and Claudine Roger. It is the latest part of a photo/installation project by the artist that dates to 2015. Proulx's project involves a complex relationship with Anne Hébert 's Premier jardin (1988). The novel, in part, deals with an actress in a thinly veiled Québec City. Filled with theatrical referencing (from Molière to Beckett), this was transformed by Proulx into a book of photographs and appropriated texts in four acts, furthering the underlying theatrical aspect of the source novel. 

Sponsored by Caisse Desjardins and AC/E’s Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture, the VOX exhibition’s opening pedagogical text asserts that the works in L’imaginaire radical II: désœuvrer la valeur collectively propose to offer a set of hypothetical alternatives (which they identify as: “1) decolonize/ecologize; 2) measure; 3) organize; 4) speculate/fabulate”) to the “knowledge” offered by financial models, defined in terms of legibility and statistics. More fully: This exhibition and its accompanying events and texts speak to an attempt to produce “finance-proof” knowledge—that is to say, a space in which to consider the notion of value and its forms that is immune to the economic categorical imperative. That imperative, of course, is that of growth and profitability: the dominion of measurement, of the readability of indexes, of statistical commensurability. In the place of this, the curatorial position statement suggests, are a set of rival propositions or p