By Guillaume Lachapelle
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Text by Marsha Taichman
[...] There is art
unless there is so much missing
we cannot build a structure around it..
- Kate Hall, from Water Tower, 1998-2000 (after Rachel Whiteread)
Montreal artist Guillaume Lachapelle presents a new collection of works at Art Mûr that is sure to surprise and delight gallery goers. These works are full of pristine lines and beautiful intrigue. He constructs and presents miniatures and life-size pieces that are subversive and unusual upon close examination. In these pieces, scale can be quite skewed. Even when objects are the size that we expect them to be, say, a 15-foot silver gazebo that one may enter and stand inside, they seem small. Lachapelle’s works can be mounted displays of tiny mechanical-seeming devices, apparatuses of unknown origins with no clear purpose, despite the fact that they offer a distinct air of functionality.
In the works that Lachapelle has selected for this exhibition at Art Mûr, his subject matter has moved away from human and animal scenes and delved deeper into free-standing machinations. This means that we will see a greater starkness and a closer focus on the materiality in his constructions. The collection is full of the unexpected and the unusual. A library with a sunken-in, curved interior of wavy shelves...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Art by Medium: Nylon