The Agglomerations: Postcards and Small Formats
May 6 – Jun 5
Martin Désilets

Opening Reception May 6, 6-8 pm




Martin Désilets, Aggomerations #16 (detail), 2002


The Agglomerations is a body of work inspired by recent visits to Lebanon. Its title conjures up the housing agglomerations that make up the cities and towns of the country, and suggests the notion of a journey through these spaces and locations. It also describes the project in its eclectic form. One particular formal element, however, is excluded: the Green Line. During the war years in Beirut, that is what people called the line that separated eastern and western quarters of the city. The Agglomerations evoke the multiplicity and wealth of a culture and a territory. Also embodied here is a kind of waking dream—that of a territory forever exempt of any green line.

Martin Désilets’s work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Quebec, Ontario, Lebanon and Mexico. In his artistic practice, various fragments accumulate in a play of exits and recontextualizations that create a syntax in which what is not said and not represented is often as important as what takes centre stage.