Collage Crimes: Carte grise à Guy Maddin

Guy Maddin and Ordnance Pictures

The exhibition runs from April 25 to May 31, 2008
The gallery is open from Tuesday to Saturday, from noon to 5 pm

Opening and launch of issue 136 of 24 images magazine devoted to Guy Maddin on Saturday, April 26 at 5 pm, in the presence of Guy Maddin

Each year, Dazibao invites an artist, for whom the image is central to his creative practice, to curate a Carte grise in the form of an exhibition and related events. The artist selects work by other artists susceptible of creating, in such a way, a kind of resonance box around his practice—a dialogue that allows us to get a better sense of where his work draws its ideas. In the past ten years, Gilbert Boyer, Raymond Gervais, Lani Maestro, Pierre Dorion, Raymonde Avril, Evergon, Geneviève Cadieux, Jocelyn Robert and Michael Snow, among others, have curated a Carte grise. For 2008, the event has been entrusted to Guy Maddin, the internationally-acclaimed Canadian filmmaker, who created Collage Crimes. The product of preparatory work carried out by the Ordnance Pictures collective, this Carte grise is entirely constructed around the idea of collage and some of its corollaries. The development of new technologies has constantly pushed back the boundaries of photography. Paradoxically, images today are still based conceptually on optics, even as this mechanical procedure gradually disappears from their very production. In this sense, Guy Maddin’s work is exemplary.

The exhibition is divided into three sections. In the first, with Lullaby, Maddin has compiled a series of clips from genre films—or perhaps we should call them sub-genre films—spliced together at a frantic pace and which marked, inspired or served as motifs for his own films. Every possible archetype is seen in this intense montage of images of the human drama. Maddin offers us here images of melodrama in its purest form, which he defines as “real life in all its excess and without inhibition”. Beyond the pathos running across the surface there also takes shape a history of the gaze, examining mutations in representational practices with extreme keenness and a sense of humour, which is, at the very least, jubilatory.

In the second part of the exhibition, Maddin presents Cowardly Sandwich, a new assemblage created out of his own work. He has set one of his own short films between each chapter of the film Cowards Bend the Knee, without it being clear which film is framing which. In doing so, Maddin imposes on the viewer a new reading of his work, a reading which makes the most possible use of the tension that exists between the seemingly heterogeneous, anachronistic and incompatible elements he has brought together.

Finally, Maddin presents some twenty collages and a silent video produced as part of his involvement with the collective Ordnance Pictures. These collages, created in weekly gatherings, function as an incubator for one of his new projects, Keyhole, a sort of combinatory and interactive film.

In collaboration with Dazibao and in conjunction with the exhibition, the magazine 24 images published a special dossier on Guy Maddin’s films with an accompanying DVD containing the first-ever collection of his short films. The magazine will be officially launched at the exhibition’s opening night.

Guy Maddin is an independent filmmaker who has made a number of short films and nine features, including his most recent film, My Winnipeg, for which he received the Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007 and which also screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. His eccentric films, which betray the artist’s interest in silent cinema of the 1920s and in sound, have been distributed widely, particularly in the United States, South America and Europe. Maddin has received numerous major awards for his work, including the prestigious Telluride Medal. He lives and works in Winnipeg, his home town.

Ordnance Pictures is made up of Guy Maddin, Paul Butler, Michael Dumontier, Brad Phillips, Simon Hughes, Jeff Funnell, Alicia Smith and Caelum Vatnsdal. The group grew out of the meeting of Maddin and Butler, who is known internationally for his Collage Parties, a nomadic studio in which artists are invited to get together to develop ideas and create experimental collages. The members of Ordnance Pictures participated in these gatherings, creating collages based on an idea for a film script by Maddin.

Dazibao thanks the artists and the team of 24 images magazine for their generous collaboration and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.