PARALLEL LINES:
DIGITAL EXHIBITION
The idea of being "alone together" as a determining condition of our contemporary life has never been as real as it is now. In this period of globally shared solitude, PHI invited artists from the Greater Montreal area to make their voices heard through creation. Parallel Lines is a call to artists to exercise their agency through creation, as a means of inquiry, expression and action. For sixty days, we followed the artistic process of ten selected candidates, from all disciplines.
For some, the confinement provided a space in which they could develop a daily practice – whether it was writing a novel (Philippe Collard), producing intimist paintings (Naghmeh Sharifi), creating a series of folds highlighting our lives online (Marilou Lyonnais), or conducting portrait sessions via video chat (Connor Willumsen). Everyday life, alternately extraordinary and banal, has become the direct material for some of the works produced during the residency. It examines what we do, what we devote ourselves to, what occupies our attention: the mechanisms of sleep disorders in Dayna McLeod, the maintenance of a self-sufficient garden sculpture by Adam Basanta.
Some of the creators involved in Parallel Lines offer us the opportunity to adapt to our immediate environments, inevitably transformed by the current situation. Sometimes it’s a question of helping us to redraw the contours that delimit the exterior and interior of our homes: by turning a walk in one's neighbourhood into a moment of meditation and exploration through Lexis’ soundscapes; or, like with Philippe Dubost's project, by transforming our walls and screens into poetic surfaces. For others, the usual places are renewed: a garden of sculptures, the space of a virtual concert by Justin Wright, or a series of irreverent graphic interferences by the Gauche/Droite collective.
This first digital exhibition of Parallel Lines brings together the proposals of the ten candidates, which we invite you to discover through the randomized navigation tool.