Curator: Marie J. Jean
In collaboration with Vox, centre de l’image contemporaine, this exhibition is part of the project Period rooms. 8 art experimentations, 24 historic interiors. Thomas Bégin’s site-specific intervention takes Guido Molinari’s workspace – his studio, partly converted into a museum and open to the public – as its starting point, and it spills over to all of the Guido Molinari Foundation exhibition spaces.
Employing the device of the period room, this studio-under-glass reveals the traces, in multiple layers, of the visual artist’s work over a twenty-year span. Bégin’s intent is to deploy these multiple temporal strata, conceiving of the studio as a production “machine” in which ideas, experimentations and serial works succeeded each other. Starting from this “period mental room,” Bégin has devised various sound sculptures, visually abstract and musically concrete, that evince a rapprochement with Molinari’s conceptual and chromatic research, entering into unexpected dialogue with them. This exhibition follows from research conducted by the artist during a spring 2019 residency at the Foundation.
Thomas Bégin is a multidisciplinary artist as well as a musician. His most recent works are sound installations fashioned from discarded audiovisual components, found musical instruments, and electric gadgetry. His devices, synthesizers of sorts, generate sounds and noises, but also organize them inside dynamic structures arising directly from the physical properties of their constituent materials. Bégin thus explores various sound composition possibilities through a process of plastic and technical assembly specific to sculpture. He has shown his works in Quebec as well as abroad, in venues ranging from the Centre d’art Est-Nord-Est (Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, 2013) to the Darling Foundry (Montreal, 2014), the Tsonami Sound Art Festival (Valparaiso, Chile, 2016), the West Den Haag Gallery (The Hague, Netherlands, 2017), Galerie B-312 (Montreal, 2006 and 2017), Factatory (Lyon, France, 2018), and the Festival Sonandes (La Paz, Bolivia, 2018).
