NEW VOICES
Marginalia
October 27, 2023 – December 9, 2023
Artist
Celia Perrin Sidarous
Curator
Gentiane Bélanger
Overview
Marginalia examines the narratives whose spectral presence lingers on the fringes of official histories. In this new body of work, Celia Perrin Sidarous delves into her family’s mixed heritage, with a particular focus on the fragments of memory that, akin to floaters or other optical phenomena, evade or appear tangentially within dominant narratives. Consisting of a film cycle in seven parts presented as an asynchronous diptych on two television monitors, photographic works, and a cluster of ambiguous artefacts (amphoras, shells, fruit stones and other modest morsels), Marginalia cultivates the allegorical nature of the still life genre in an installation that evokes the haptic power of objects as receptacles of memory. In the form of a delicate and personal archaeological dig, the artist’s family archives are tended to, in an attempt to reveal subtexts that exist beneath the surface. What emerges is an open-ended sequence of intersecting temporalities that takes shape in the sensorial appeal of sculptural objects in the scenic tableaux, meticulously arranged by anonymous hands and scrutinized by the eye of the camera.
Artist
Celia Perrin Sidarous (1982) is an image-based artist living and working in Montréal. Her works have been featured in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Canada and abroad : McCord Museum, Centre CLARK and Bradley Ertaskiran (Montréal), Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery (Tokyo), Norsk Billedhoggerforening (Oslo), CONTACT Photography Festival (Toronto) and FOCUS Photography Festival (Mumbai), 8-11 and The Plumb (Toronto), Arsenal Contemporary (New York), Esker Foundation (Calgary), Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), Banff Centre (Banff), WWTWO (Montréal), VU (Québec) and Gallery 44 (Toronto). Her work was included in the Biennale de Montréal 2016 — Le Grand Balcon / The Grand Balcony, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. She is one the five laureates of the Prix en art actuel MNBAQ 2023, offered by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. She was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2019, and is the recipient of the Prix Pierre-Ayot 2017, as well as the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award 2011. Her works are present in private and public collections, most notably at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Walter Phillips Gallery. She is represented by Patel Brown, in Toronto and Montréal.
Documentation
