2021 | GROUP EXHIBITION
DÉRIVE
MONTREAL
Feb 11 - 28

DÉRIVE

Feb 11 - 28, 2021

With this new virtual exhibition, we pause to reflect on a particularly intense and thought-provoking year. From the five-alarm red of Wanda Koop's prescient Capitol painting to the introspective drift of Scott McFarland's The Long Way Home, the works assembled here take stock of a period filled with hiatus and hope, upheaval and quietude.  

As our social lives contracted in 2020, our virtual worlds expanded. With its spectral city, floating dream-like within an android’s head, Wanda Koop’s ink drawing captures both the confinement and limitlessness of our condition.

Hauntingly barren scenes such as Pierre Dorion’s Marfa townscape, Wanda Koop’s blacked-out skyscrapers, and Nicolas Baier’s papered-over storefronts were created before the pandemic struck; now, in the limbo of lockdown, we recognize them as our cities in sleep mode. 

And perhaps no works in the show better encapsulate the abstracted serenity of 2020 than a polarized photograph by Pascal Grandmaison and a poem transcribed by Simon Bertrand. Bertrand’s piece is a reference to Hamlet’s Ophelia. Written with eyes closed, its undulating script unspools in loose waves, evoking Shakespeare’s drowned heroine. Grandmaison’s sharply rotated portrait of a boy – a reference to Rodin’s The Thinker - conveys the refuge we sought from a world turned upside down.

This spring already looks very different than last. The Australian bushfires depicted in Wanda Koop’s BREAKING NEWS (Midday in Eden) have abated. A new US administration has assumed office, reversing many of the policies symbolized by Michel de Broin’s 2013 bronze of an inverted Statue of Liberty. And as vaccines arrive, so will a semblance of pre-pandemic life. In the meantime, our long, waking dream lengthens.