MONTREAL.- BGL returns once again to
Parisian Laundry with a comprehensive solo exhibition on the main floor of the gallery space. Always working beyond expectation, BGL's latest exhibition, Concessionaire explores the walls of the gallery. A jest towards the long-standing significance of wall work in the private gallery space, Concessionaire is a sculptural interpretationof this hierarchy. BGL's installation and sculpture-based practice is thus re-affirmed and re-enforced in this witty gallery intervention. Québec city collective BGL has exhibited widely and frequently both in solo and group exhibitions including Nuit Blanche, Paris, Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne (France), The 1er Bienal del fin del mundo, Ushuaia (Argentina), the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Canada), Musée d'art moderne Lille Métropole (France), Mercer Union,Toronto (Canada); Hart House, University of Toronto (Canada), The Havana Biennale ( Cuba) and The Montreal Biennale (Canada). BGL has been recognized by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and were twice finalists for the Sobey Award. Their work is found in the collectionsof The Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec, The Montreal Museum of Fine Art, The Montréal Museum of Contemporary Art and The National Gallery of Canada. BGL's work is equally found integrated into the architecture of the new building housing the Montréal Symphonic Orchestra.
Currently based in Richmond , Virginia, American artist, Michael Jones McKean exhibits The Gilded Scab, a new large-scale sculpture in Parisian Laundry's bunker space. In keeping with the sculptural language of McKean's recent works, The Gilded Scab's central axis is a large platform loosely responding to the limits of the architecture. The clad, polished steel of the platform becomes the pivot-surface for a merger of inchoate materials, refined sculptures, surrogates, artifacts and objects that are at once wholly tangible in their physical here-and-now-ness, yet alsosweetly unsettled as the projected narrative space loops elliptically in a constant state of becoming. Michael Jones McKean (Truk Island, Micronesia, 1976) is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Nancy Graves Foundation Award and an Artadia Award. McKean has been in residence at The Core Program at the Museumof Fine Arts, Houston, The International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. McKean regularly exhibits internationally, most recently at Art Athina, in Athens (Greece) and the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Tel Aviv, (Israel). Michael Jones McKean is represented by Horton Gallery in New York City and Gentili Apri in Berlin, Germany.
MLO regional finalists - Parisian Laundry hosts Quebec's regional finalists for the Migrating Landscapes Organizer, a collaborative effort that results in selected projects being exhibited in the Canadian pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Migrating Landscapes was selected by a national juried competition as Canada's official entry atthe 2012 Venice Biennale in Architecture. It will be presented by Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture and Jae-Sung Chon, who joined together for this project to form a new entity: the Migrating Landscapes Organizer (MLO).