CENT VINGT-CINQ HEURES

Galerie B-312 is pleased to present Cent vingt-cinq heures, the most recent installation by artist Amélie Laurence Fortin. Have you ever had an experience so intense that it transformed you forever? Changing the way you apprehend the world, but most importantly, the view you have of yourself. How can you describe this feeling of strength inside you? How can this tension juggling both fear and fascination be embodied in an art object? How do you bring this experience to a spectator? These are some of the questions that Amélie Laurence Fortin has inhabited throughout the construction of Cent vingt-cinq heures, the fourth and final act of Le roc étincelant* series. In Cent vingt-cinq heures, Amélie Laurence Fortin proposes an ambitious installation – rich with her own expeditions, but also her research: theoretical, physical and material - putting forward both the performative and contemplative character of the sculptural object. In the small room of the gallery, she creates a reflexive space on the monumentality of landscape and our way of grasping it. A mountain structure, a Herculean and imposing black mass and hovers over us. In its centre flows a fine rain of glass beads, marking time, the erosion of matter also subject to the contingencies of the environment. If through her work the artist has habituated us to allegorize and synthesize the intensity of risk taking and its outcomes in the face of nature, here she introduces, more poetically, the notion of time passing, of completion, by creating a structure operating like an hourglass that marks the one hundred and twenty-five hours that the exhibition lasts. This flow in continuous movement authorises a spell through its repetition, a fascination where the sensory dimension of the architectural space makes one live through an experiment. At the end of the exhibition, a duplication of form will be accomplished. At our feet, the translucent mound crystallizes perceptually and conceptually at the end of one hundred and twenty-five hours. An exhibition to see over and over, to capture all the excess.  

 —Original text in French by Isabelle Guimond

* A series of installations based on the theme of expedition —Act 1 - La chambre des idoles, La Chambre Blanche, 2011 —Act 2 - Exploit, VU PHOTO, 2012 —Act 3 - Le paysage miraculeux, Sporobole, 2014 —Act 4 - Cent vingt-cinq heures, Galerie B-312, 2016

Galerie B-312 would like to thank its membres and donors, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal and the Canada Council for the Arts.