Christine Davis, Adad Hannah, Franz West

Franz West, Chameleon, 2004. Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Photo: Courtesy Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid.

Christine Davis, Not I / pas moi, 2006-2007. Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Photo: Courtesy the artist.

Adad Hannah, Cuba Still (Remake), 2005. Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Photo: Courtesy Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain.

Now comprising almost 7,500 works executed mainly between 1939 and today, the Musée Collection offers a relevant panorama of the main trends in contemporary art. Although it is strongest in paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and photographs, it also holds a significant number of works of installation art, exemplary pieces by artists whose individual practices combine the personal and the universal.  

Among them are creators like Bill Viola, Gary Hill, James Turrell, Louise Bourgeois, Christian Boltanski, Thomas Hirschhorn, Geneviève Cadieux, Barbara Steinman and Marcel Dzama. Continuing the dynamic policy of presenting the collections in rotation — a policy imposed by a lack of gallery space — the Musée is now displaying three major installations acquired over the past two years: Not I / pas moi (2006-2007) by Christine Davis, Cuba Still (Remake) (2005) by Adad Hannah and Chameleon (2004) by Franz West. Together they are the focus of the exhibition The Collection: Some Installations.

Franz West was born in 1947 in Vienna, where he lives and works. Since the early 1970s, he has been creating sculptures and installations that feature familiar objects and pieces of furniture given back their archetypal dimension. A chair, a table, an armchair, a sofa, a bed, a carpet, upholstering fabric… each in turn becomes the basis for a critical, provocative and deliberately insolent meditation on the nature and scope of the act of making art. In Chameleon, West uses one of his favourite strategies, that of disguising the utilitarian nature of the objects, in this case, a round table and eight chairs. It is colour that rules within this austere installation: the solid colour, which varies according to the choice of those displaying the work, covers the walls, the tabletop, and the backs and seats of all the chairs. By requiring this participation on the part of the collector or museum, on the one hand, West is insisting on the real importance of colour as opposed to the falsely decorative function often accorded to it, and on the other hand, he is giving this installation, this skilful combination of painting and sculpture, a conceptual and existential dimension that is reasserted each time it is exhibited.   

For over twenty years, Vancouver-born Christine Davis, who now lives and works in Toronto, has been creating an original body of work forged from high-quality images projected in the form of slides, a photographic medium threatened with obsolescence in an era greedy for new technology. The targeted subjects and literary references are inscribed on material supports often of a slightly magical kind: flowers, feathers, butterflies… In Not I / pas moi, the continuous rhythmic projection of extracts from texts by Samuel Beckett and Simone Weil on a hanging screen covered with vintage buttons is reflected on two mirrors framing (embedding) the screen. The sequences of words are screened alternately in French and in English, and thus become readable backwards and forwards in turn on the screen and on the mirrors. The tragic beauty of the words re-positions viewers within their own subjectivity, but still unremittingly faced with the negation of the “I” and the impossibility of grasping the continuous flow of a silent and powerful dialogue.  

Born in New York in 1971, Adad Hannah lives and works in Montréal. Cuba Still (Remake) is in a way a continuation of his “Stills” series of tableaux vivants, which he commenced in about 2000. Starting with a publicity still for a banal forgotten film which he purchased in Havana in 2003, Hannah restored to the screen, for the purposes of video capture, the six characters from the original image. The resulting six videos were then screened simultaneously side by side so as to remake, in a single cinematic image, the fabricated sequence of the apparently motionless images of the tableaux vivants. An ingenious projecting mechanism — six wooden lecterns and a system of cutout masks — plus the original photograph and the images of the six characters complete this installation, which crystallizes the notions of the photographic moment and of duration, the respective merits of the fixed and the moving image, and the particular nature of photography and film.