Growth & Risk

GROWTH & RISK
An exhibition of 13 artists
from Quebec, Canada
put together for the
Québec ! New York Event
Autumn 2001

ARTISTS

MICHEL GOULET

Born in Asbestos, Québec in 1944, Michel Goulet now lives and works in Montréal. He represented Canada at the 1988 Venice Biennale, and, in 1990 was recipient of the Paul-Émile-Borduas Prize, Québec's highest distinction for a visual artist. Known foremost for his indoor and outdoor steel sculptures, Goulet has also realized numerous stage settings. For his latest solo exhibition, Porter le mur comme le masque, at the Centre Culturel Canadien in Paris in 2000, Goulet realized his interest in integrating the art forms of sculpture and scenography. The work shown was produced in collaboration with playwrights, composers and visual artists. Michel Goulet is represented by the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto and by the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Mouvements et motions (Movements and Motions)

As a sculptor, Michel Goulet creates his sculptural works by selecting objects, which he either remodels or interconnects. Most of his re-made objects are made of steel and retain their original scale. His arrangements of ready-mades and re-mades probe our notion of origin versus representation. In this way, they also trigger our memory of the objects as we knew them, as well as triggering our imagination in construing their new context. The artist's creative process is simultaneously accompanied by a re-arrangement of words and their meanings. Often his titles, such as Tour/tours, Motifs/mobiles or Arms/No Harm, more than just informing the work, surface as an integral constituent in the work.

This accumulation also reflects Goulet's continuing interest in enumeration - not only engaging in simple juxtaposition, but an almost obsessive attempt to gather, to inventory. In this way, he avoids mere nomination, and the imposition of a unique perspective. Indeed, the two works he is showing in the exhibition Growth & Risk, Mouvements et motions and Corner Markers, perfectly underscore his predilection for rendering objects more complex through the multiplication of viewpoints. These works, each in their own way, and almost to the brink of the spectral meeting-place of body and nothingness, return to one of Goulet's favourite tropes: the container.

Growth & Risk
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