Programming

Opening: Sunday, February 19, 2006 from noon to 3 pm
Nuit Blanche: Saturday, February 25, 2006 from 9pm to 3am (as part of the Montréal All-Nighter Nuit blanche event)
Vernissage and nuit blanche: at Viger Square, in the Ville-Marie borough and in public parking lots, Montreal

Project: Char brun. Medium: dirty snow. The exhibition presented at DARE-DARE is the result of a project realized in Quebec City in February 2004. Inspired by an outdoor parking lot in the Lower Town, Stéphanie Pelletier decided to intervene there. A mound of dirty snow occupied a parking space and offered itself as exploitable material. In one night, with the help of a friend, she carved a car from this pile. Given the quality of the snow, the model chosen was that of the "char brun" (square-like and old car). The altered state of matter emphasized one of the consequences of the use of the automobile and immediately returned the brown car to its context. By the ambient situation around it, this context acted as an alternative to the proposal, because the brown car was "browning" day by day.

As part of her exhibition at DARE-DARE, Pelletier starts with the idea of ​​the brown car and sculpture on dirty snow to reconsider Viger Square and its immediate vicinity. She even allows herself to star the anticipated changes in the neighborhood with the arrival of the University Hospital of Montreal. Her efforts to "revitalize the area" will result in attempts to respond to the architecture of the square and the neighborhood.

" I make objects related to the world in which I live. It is through these that I put in perspective the mass culture, the ordinary, the useful. I create to better understand. It is by working in relation to the collective imagination that I try to make the common a little more magnificent. I engage with humor in a free re-interpretation of cultural and identity symbols. I propose other contexts and question them.

Although I am interested in the specificities of sculpture, I am passionate about investing art in its context. It is through this desire that I develop in situ interventions. I imitate, I reproduce, I interpose myself within a territory. These interventions act as possibles or as factors of doubt. They offer a break. It is animated by a desire of concordance between place, matter and intention that I direct my choices and that I bring art closer to life. I transform the material to start a dialogue with others, the space and the weather. "

Stéphanie Pelletier (Québec) recently completed a residency at the Center Est-Nord-Est (St-Jean-Port-Joli) and recently completed studies in Visual Arts at Laval University. She has participated in many events including Picnic, Agora festif and La Biennale des couvertes. At DARE-DARE, she presents her first solo exhibition.