Winter 2016 Exhibitions

For The Power Plant’s winter 2016 season, the gallery presents exhibitions incorporating film, photography, sound and moving image by artists Patrick Bernatchez, Leslie Hewitt and Aude Moreau, alongside the Fleck Clerestory Commission by Carlos Amorales (fall 2015).

Patrick Bernatchez
Les Temps inachevés
Les Temps inachevés brings together a selection of works by Canadian artist Patrick Bernatchez drawn from two major cycles: Chrysalides (2006–13) and Lost in Time (2009–15). This exhibition provides an opportunity to examine the scope of an interdisciplinary, polymorphous practice that embraces film, sound, sculpture and photography. The title of the exhibition, which may be translated as “unending times,” refers to the evolutive nature of Bernatchez’s practice, in which each work, cycle and exhibition is considered by the artist as being open-ended. Chrysalides revolves around questions of life and death, mutation and transformation, while temporality in all of its various dimensions is the overriding leitmotif of Lost in Time.

Presentation and circulation of the exhibition is organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Curated by Lesley Johnstone, Head of Exhibitions and Education, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Exhibition Coordination by Clara Halpern, RBC Curatorial Fellow, The Power Plant. Co-produced by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, in partnership with Argos, Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, and The Power Plant, Toronto.

Leslie Hewitt
Collective Stance
Collective Stance is an exhibition of work by New York-based artist Leslie Hewitt, featuring her collaboration with renowned cinematographer Bradford Young. Seeing its Canadian premiere at The Power Plant, Untitled (Structures) (2012) is a two-channel video installation. Provoked by a collection of mid-twentieth-century photographs exploring shifting notions of nationhood, protest and belonging housed at the Menil Collection in Houston, the work is comprised of a series of silent (non-linear) vignettes filmed at locations significant to the era. A new film installation, Stills (2015), will also debut, a work which incorporates footage from the two-year shooting of Untitled (Structures). The exhibition also includes a selection of works from Hewitt’s individual practice informed by her collaboration with Young. Her study of the Menil Collection’s archive prompted several questions regarding memory and the encoding of historical narratives. The subtext of the image archive asks: what wasn’t pictured? What was missed? How do the original images circulate in the collective and historical imagination? Hewitt and Young take up these questions in a myriad of ways.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book co-published with Dancing Foxes and SculptureCenter, New York. Curated by Julia Paoli, Assistant Curator, The Power Plant.

Aude Moreau
The Political Nightfall
The photographic, film and sound works of Aude Moreau cast a hitherto unexampled light on the conventional North American city, with its modernist grid, its towers soaring to breathtaking heights and its illuminated logos that speak the language of multinational corporations and their prowess. Moreau embeds film in architecture, writing in glass and transparency in opacity—all visual means by which the artist directs a critical gaze on hidden issues such as the privatization of the public space and the omnipresence of economic power. In deflecting and refashioning the iconography of these often stereotypical urban images, Moreau highlights issues that dim towards a gathering political darkness.

Presentation and circulation of the exhibition is organized by the Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal. Curated by Louise Déry, Director, Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal. Produced by the Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal, in partnership with the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain and The Power Plant, Toronto.

Carlos Amorales
Black Cloud
Carlos Amorales’ Black Cloud (2007/2015)—the first of The Power Plant’s Fleck Clerestory Commission Program projects—immerses spectators in a swarm of 30,000 delicate black moths, whose frailty and stilled flight contrasts with the sordidness of their forceful infestation. At once beautiful and unnerving, the black moths appear to have entered and enveloped the gallery through its iconic smoke stack. The work’s reference to the Industrial Revolution fittingly recalls The Power Plant’s history as a storage space for coal, as well as the gradual shift of Toronto’s waterfront from a space of industry to one of culture and tourism.

Presented in partnership with Nuit Blanche, Toronto. Guest Curated by Christine Shaw.

Support for Les Temps inachevés: Support Donors, Anonymous and Peter Ross; Donors, Catherine Barbaro & Tony Grossi and Bureau du Québec à Toronto.

Support for Collective Stance: Lead Sponsor, TD; Major Donor, Consulate General of the United States, Toronto; Support Donors, In honour of Dr. Henry A Collins & Adeline D Collins, Lonti Ebers, Lillian & Billy Mauer, In memory of Muriel Prokopow; Donors, Dr. Kenneth Montague & Ms. Sarah Aranha, Olga Korper Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Supported by Westbury National Show Systems Ltd.

Support for The Political Nightfall: Donors, Lillian & Billy Mauer and Bureau du Québec à Toronto.

Support for Black Cloud: Lead Donors, La Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso and Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation; Supported by AeroMexico and Consulate General of Mexico.

About The Power Plant
The Power Plant is Canada’s leading public gallery devoted exclusively to contemporary visual art. It is a vital forum for the advanced artistic culture of our time that offers an exceptional facility and professional support to diverse living artists while engaging equally diverse audiences in their work. 

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