The current show at Les Territoires, Ville Imaginaire, creates its own fantastic world. Noémie da Silva, Marie Dauverné, Mélissa M. Dupuis, Vanessa Lapointe, Payam Mofidi and Sayeh Sarfaraz have brought together their different practices in order to present, as the title suggests, an imaginary town. Les Territoires presents this exhibition as a work in progress, a show, workshop and studio space, implying that this is one incarnation of the group’s collaborative project.

The show itself is intriguing and playful. You enter the gallery and on the far wall and the one to the right is a series of peepholes. Some are small circles, one is long and horizontal and another is torn away pieces of the wall. When you peek into these holes you see magical dioramas, installations of glasses and other objects, photographs and videos too. At the end of the right wall are a number of shelves with little plasticine figures and objects – a teeny-tiny installation that lets your imagination go wild. The second room of the gallery has a single work. On the floor the drawing of a floorplan is covered with a white dust and projected on to that is a stop motion animation video of dismembered figures moving around, seen through a red filter. The artists have created a weird world, not utopian or dystopian but merely different. Their choice of materials (fimo figures, stop motion animation and dioramas) adds a childlike playfulness to the show. We’re brought back to the imagination of our own youth and reminded of how our own minds can create whole universes.

Les Territoires, space 527
Noémie da Silva, Marie Dauverné, Mélissa M. Dupuis, Vanessa Lapointe, Payam Mofidi and Sayeh Sarfaraz
Ville Imaginaire
June 1 – June 23, 2012
www.lesterritoires.org