From January 18th to February 15th, 2020,
@ Usine C, Montréal
The Empire project comes from a desire to address the issues of money and power in world culture as well as local culture and how it impacts the way artists work. It is an obvious fact for me that recent art history can be interpreted as the result of large empires justifying their imporance through culture. I plan to explore the different elements that constitute painting history’s relation to money and power.
My figurative paintings are an exploration of my personal relation to art and culture, and I want to create a series of paintings that allude to the notion of Empire, with its effects on populations but also on art-history and present art-making.
No specific empire in history is targeted by this project, it is inspired by the book Empire (2000) by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The book argues that ther has been a historic paradigm shift between “modern” imperialism based on nation-states and an emerging post-modernism created by the ruling classes and basing its authority on military force and on international legal creations (UN, NATO, IMF, etc.). Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the authors theorize an Empire thought of as an agencement, an “arrangement”, a totalizing mechanism against which the only possible resistance is negation.