Venue: Contemporary Urban Centre, McGarry Room 5th Floor
41-51 Greenland Street
Liverpool, L1 0BS
United Kingdom
+44 151 708 3519
+44 151 709 6460
Date: 20th September - 30th October, Tues-Sun 10am-6pm

Artists: BGL, François Chevalier, Gabriel Routhier, Le Duo Doyon /Rivest, Thierry Arcand Bossé, Anna Rewakowicz, Jean Marc Mathieu Lajoie, Diane Landry. Manifestation Internationale D'art de Quebec in collaboration with Jump Ship Rat, proudly presents Vue sur Québec, an event born of the exchange between the Québec city biennial, the Manif d'art, and the Liverpool biennial.Vue sur Quebec curated by Lisanne Nadeau showcases eleven artists at the CUC, each of them featured in one of the past editions of Québec city biennial. When we were first invited to participate in the 2008 edition of the Liverpool Biennial, our primary motivations were to open a window on Québec's visual arts trends, under the Manif d'art perticular perspective. Vue sur Quebec showcases eleven artists, each of them featured in one of the past editions of Québec city biennial. In addition to the exhibition at CUC, three billboard-supported works will be scattered around the city. The proposed selection, marked by the obvious presence of artists from Québec, aims at responding to the suggested theme: Made up.

As the second edition of the Manif d'art discussed happiness, it was noticeable that the most pertinent productions of the event - as well as the recent work of many Quebecois artists - are those that explored these themes by lure and ambiguity; for evoking life, happiness and a live force also means to breach forth places of paradoxes and contraries. Here, one will remark that the everyday life constitutes a favored territory, should it be objects or images confined within self, found, smuggled and derived from signification. Pop aesthetics (Gabriel Routhier) and re-usage of the advertising language (Doyon/Rivest), urban interventions (BGL, Ana Rewakowicz), usurpated ready-made (Jean-Marc Mathieu-Lajoie and Diane Landry), pictural work (Thierry Arcand-Bossé) and reinvented drawing (François Chevalier) are numerous avenues that weave a coherent corpus identified by a unique cultural heritage. Jolliness sometimes obstructs a caustic or nostalgic approach, humour dissimulates an ill, a doubt. It is indeed interesting to explore, through this rhetoric, the stakes of these oddities and theatrical displays.