Exhibition: May 14 – June 20, 2015
Vernissage: Thursday May 14th from 5 pm to 7:30 pm

John Player
Nouveaux tableaux

Michel Huneault
10 Minutes à Tohoku

Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by John Player in parallel with a projection of 10 Minutes at Tohoku, a documentary video by photographer Michel Huneault.

John Player’s work presents a restrained and detached view of surveillance culture. Endless defense from an unknown but constant threat is unveiled in appropriated images from mass media, newspapers and archives found largely on the Internet. The imagery shares a kind of aesthetic of power and control, now commonplace and even expected, as well as a paradoxical inertia. Dominant culture’s obsession with speed and control is confronted with the slow read of painting; the banality and distraction of technology challenged by painterly care.

Michel Huneault’s 10 minutes at Tohoku is the video component of Post Tohoku, a transmedia art documentary project, bringing us to Japan one year after the 2011 tsunami hit the region. On March of that year, the Tohoku coast of Japan was devastated by a triple catastrophe: earthquake, tsunami, nuclear incident. 15 880 deaths, 2694 missing, 128 931 buildings destroyed. Michel Huneault travelled to Tohoku a year after the event with these questions in mind: How to represent the long term physical and psychological impacts of such a catastrophe, the trauma, the void? How to make sense of it while avoiding disaster porn? How to live near or in this scarred landscape for the years to come? Will Tohoku rebuild, physically and in our minds? 10 minutes at Tohoku is the resulting meditative video, shot along 250 km of the affected coast, from Fukushima to Kesennuma.

(Text: Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain)

More info: www.pfoac.com