Culture pour tous

Contamination in Laval: a revisited and modified art collection

After several attempts to infiltrate the commercial sector, the artist Patricia Gauvin convinced the City of Laval to promote its art collection by holding creation workshops.

The City of Laval holds a collection of art works that has been built up over the years of numerous cultural events and the 30 year mushrooming of this important Montreal neighbour city. The City has over 350 of these “artifacts” spread throughout the territory with the “aim to make art alive and accessible to all,” according to Gilles Vaillancourt’s words of (the mayor of Laval since June 1989) published in 2002 in the catalogue L’art dans la ville, histoire d’une collection. The city’s mandate is to encourage the dissemination of this collection and to promote it. When the artist Patricia Gauvin approached the Laval Bureau des arts et de la culture and proposed to organize workshops inspired by the collection, the proposal stirred a definite interest, especially so because the artist had previously tested her idea among Laval artists (Thomas Corriveau and Marcel St-Pierre) who are directly addressed by her project and who backed its implementation.

Let us now take a closer look at the workings of this adventure. The artist proposed that the city employees be invited to take a photograph of their workplace. Subsequently, these same people were to send this digital photograph using an avatar as a name—hence, anonymously—to the website www.patriciagauvin.com/jeu_laval/episode1.html created by the artist, and then to choose a “favourite” work among the City of Laval art collection. During the art workshops, in which gouache and brushes were the main medium, they were to take inspiration from the chosen work to transform one of the black and white photograph prints by letting themselves be absorbed by the techniques, form, aesthetic, reference or texture of the original work.

If you think this was child’s play, think again. The realization of the project took nearly a year, from the initial artist’s proposal up until the opening of the exhibition at the Maison des arts de Laval during the Journées de la culture in September 2008. Beyond the administrative acceptance process, it was necessary to obtain the permission of the artists included in the Laval collection—around 40 accepted—to photograph their work and make it accessible on the playful website put together by Patricia Gauvin.

“Let Yourself be Contaminated by Art!”

Afterwards the participants had to be recruited. The City widely distributed a leaflet among its employees and that of Laval organizations inviting them to let themselves be “contaminated by art.” It announced upcoming information sessions and art workshops regarding a collaborative project to valorize the Laval art collection. When the artist speaks of contamination, she evokes a chain reaction process so that when one person participates s/he brings in another; an essential stage of the collaborative approach. In May 2008, no more than 5 people went out of their way for the first information session, but in the course of the project’s progress people began sending their photograph to the website, selecting an artwork and relaying their experience within their entourage. At the end of the 6, 2-hour workshops held before the Journées de la culture, nearly 50 persons created over 75 new works on paper of which a selection was exhibited at the Maison des arts from last September 27 to November 2.

For Patricia Gauvin this exhibition marked the final stage of a long process begun several years ago during a study project on the reception context of the work of art and the artist in the community. At the start she had targeted big companies to initiate collaborative projects. “At times I felt like Don Quichotte,” the artist admits, now happy with the success of her Laval enterprise and her enthusiastic collaboration with Christiane Brault, the manager of the Laval Bureau des arts et de la culture and the person responsible for this art at work project. For Mrs. Brault it “is important to welcome projects and ideas that artists may offer us. And to make people aware of the art that surrounds them is a task to be carried out by a city.”