The exhibition Se Voisiner / Neighbour-ing brings together artists living in the area immediately around gallery, Produit Rien. We wanted to contact as many artists as possible and gather examples of their work in the same, relatively intimate, space – providing an opportunity for us to recognize each other and perhaps form a new sense of proximity as potential.
We began with a deliberately generous definition of ‘artist”, and put together a list of all the people we knew lived, or had a studio, within a 400 meter circle around the gallery on Marconi street. As we contacted people on the initial list we asked them to suggest other people. The initial list of perhaps a dozen people rapidly grew to over forty! Given the size of the gallery, it quickly became clear that we should install the show in Salon Style.
The city’s formal urban planning description for this area in the early 2000’s is rumoured to have been “Wild Mixture”. Since the mid- 2000s, the area has undergone waves of invasive development. The development over the last 20 years has tended to even out the idiosyncrasies and delightful strangeness of the area. All the same, we propose that some of this character remains stubbornly resistant to being tamed. We hope that the exhibition reaffirms, through the variety and vivacity of the works shown, that the wildness is still alive and well.
The organizing committee:
Lynn Hughes, Francine Lalonde, Paul Litherland, Karen Trask.
