Marie Fraser, a professor of art history at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal and former chief curator at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, will curate the project.
BGL, a three-man group that consists of members Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicolas Laverdière, has been practising its unique brand of installation and performance together for almost 20 years. Their work is notably infused with humour and a clear sense of ridiculous, and then laced with social and political implications.
In Toronto, the group created an installation for a recent Nuit Blanche in which they installed an acoustic-tile ceiling in an abandoned alleyway, lighting it with fluorescent tubes. Bringing a sterile office environment into the streets highlighted, with absurdist glee, the gross disconnect between corporate environments and the real world.
Their work runs a line of activism that undermines consumerism with a gentle but unmistakable disdain. In early works, they would coat such loaded symbols as burly chopper motorcycles with flocking, a fine-textured felt material, neutering their macho connotations while rendering them eerily inert. A 2005 work, An Adult’s Toy, was less subtle: It was a fat-tired ATV flipped on its back, arrows lodged in its underside like an animal hunted down and mercilessly killed.
Photo: Nicholas Laverdiere, left, and Jasmin Bilodeau, two-thirds of the Quebec City collective BGL, at a 2006 exhibition of their work at the Koffler Centre in Toronto.