This project is part of an exhibition that marks the 5oth anniversary of the death of architect and planner Le Corbusier, and specifically to his book, Les quatres routes.  The exhibition is curated by Marie-Ève Lamarre and Hubert Beringer, and they composed  4 teams of architects and artists to develop and realize a project based on one of the four modes of access to a city described in the book – Air, Rail, Road and Water. The air component was developed and produced by Paul Litherland, Julia Manacas and Amanda Wormsbecker. David Brodsky assisted with the installation.

Inspiré par l’ouvrage méconnu de Le Corbusier Les quatre routes, les deux commissaire ont mis au défi quatre équipes composées d’artiste en arts visuels, de designers et d’architectes à repenser notre utilisation de la ville.

Première étape : 1 novembre 2014, rencontre de type charrette où les équipes se sont formées et où les projets se sont définis.

Deuxième étape : 7 décembre 2014, réalisation des installations dans le quartier, documentation.

Troisième étape : 14 janvier au 22 février, exposition

Listener points to humanity’s  deafness towards nature.  A tree with tin ears points not to the ability of the tree to hear, but to our continued reflex to anthropomorphize our surroundings. We become the tree… If we could just hear ourselves.

More pictures from the International Symposium of Sculptors and travels in the region here: paullitherland.com/india

This work was produced following a risky BASE jump the artist made off a downtown office building around the time of the exhibition. The jump was a personal challenge, a “bucket list” act: walking to the edge and finding the courage to jump. It was done in secret, in the night, alone, without a camera or audience to record the event. So, when the artist was offered a show two weeks before the opening, the solitary but highly significant event became a natural focus as he quickly put together a work to exhibit.

Bodybuilding proposes a mix of symbolic references related to the subversive transformation of the corporate icon of an office building into a personal diving: the brick base evokes the solidity and power of architecture but is contradicted by the soft and unviable butter buildings; the eye of the artist, bigger than life, is the base for the buildings that are radically reduced in scale, the eye is not all-seeing but rather just a flat landscape for the unlikely structures that end up impeding its vision.

Body Building reflects the artist’s conflict filled relationship to both the material art object and the documentary nature of photography. In the end, it was a strange monument, commemorating an experience the artist could only allude to at the time in a cryptic statement written for the show. It was a monument to a remarkable act that went on to become central to the artist’s own oral history.

The works were produced at the the artists centre est-nord-est in St-Jean-Port-Joli, Québec, home to a large community of wood sculptors, who produce works in wood from kitsch to critical.