Searching for Surface: Discover our Special Projects

Art fairs are sites for sensorial delight: a visual playground for your eyes to wander and widen at new combinations of colour, texture, tone and shape. However, many of the pieces featured are often wall works or small sculptures. Our following four special projects shake things up, escaping the boundaries of individual gallery booths to showcase more monumental work.

Seek out these surface details, crafted by artists from across Quebec and located across both floors of the Grand Quay, to enrich your fair experience:

1. Marie-Ève Fréchette – Galerie C.O.A

O.G.N.I, 2018

In O.G.N.I., the artist focuses on anomalies. The work materializes in a plastic form of unknown origin and destination, paradoxically autonomous. A strange volume in mutation questions its evolution, its power and its limits. The tension between a seemingly precarious equilibrium and the stability of a mass that imposes itself through its human-scale dimensions evokes the dualisms of strength/fragility, norm/anomaly and genesis/decline characteristic of living things.

By fragmenting and reassembling artifacts and diverse materials, Marie-Ève Fréchette constructs a sculpture in which there is a tension born of the incongruity of connections; those that enable us to multiply approaches to the object, that activate it in different ways, that create different perspectives.

Find Marie-Ève’s work on the 1st floor near the cafe, across from Paul Petro Contemporary.

2. Marie-Eve Beaulieu – Galerie Simon Blais

Et si on recommençait ? Rétrospective 02-22, 2022

With this installation, Marie-Eve Beaulieu revisits two decades of pictorial work, collecting dozens of old paintings, studies and scraps of canvas that have accumulated over time in her studio. The canvases are lacerated, cut into more than 28,000 small squares and woven into a large, imposing yet precarious piece. This radical gesture of destruction reveals only fragments of what once was, but also testifies, through the act of weaving, to a desire to move forward: what if we started again?

Starting from an ethical reflection on the environment as an artist who gathers materials and produces works that accumulate over the years, she uses the past to project into the future, questioning process and material, but above all taking a personal look at the possibilities of rebuilding oneself through time.

Find this piece on the 2nd floor in front of the Mobilia lounge, next to the restaurant.

3. Stephen Schofield – McBride Contemporain

You say Sweeter, I say Sweater, 1992

You Say Sweeter, I say Sweater consists of an assemblage of pipes, vacuum cleaners and shapes made from textiles by securing fabric soaked in sugar syrup then inflated and dried by forced air. Representative of a series of textile works produced by the artist throughout his career, this ensemble highlights his engagement with membrane, envelope and air devices, as well as the play of dichotomies between inside and outside, empty and full.

La Lettre, 2024

La Lettre is formed by numerous interlocking molds. There are thirty-two molds in all. Forced air plays an essential role in the creation of this work. It gives shape to the bicycle inner tubes, giving the sculpture a tonic quality that evokes breathing and growth. The work's strong, contrasting colors - red and black - add a graphic aspect that enlivens its entire surface. A sister work, L'Enveloppe, is presented in the Pavillon exhibition on the second floor.

Find these works on the 1st floor near the VIP lounge, across from The Blue Building Gallery.

4. Shanie Tomassini – Patel Brown

Solar Tale, - Conte solaire, 2024

Shanie Tomassini's work explores the renewable and cyclical experience of objects, places and ideas. The metal structure articulates as an architectural and poetic bond between each object. Ball chains and semi-precious stones direct the gaze, tracing soft energetic lines between each fragment of the work. The installation invites us to reflect on the sacred that permeates everyday life. In her works, the artist analyzes the nature of a material or form, and its evolution in space and time. She uses symbols from her everyday life, which she interprets in a divinatory way through her sculptures and drawings.

Find Shanie’s work on the 1st floor in the lounge across from Birch Contemporary.