Quotidian in Quebec - appeal of Montreal Biennale exhibit that exhibited art works that reflect the everyday and ordinary aspects of life

At the inaugural Montreal Biennale, which included participants from Canada and around the world, the emphasis was upon artists who transform common realitys and experiences.

At a time when the greatest in quantity visible international exhibitions and biennials accompany to grapple with Big Questions, there is something appealing about the retiring disposition of an exhibition devoted to verse humor and the everyday. The first Montreal Biennale, which ran from Aug. 27 to Oct 18 last fall, took up these themes with understated grace.

The exhibition was organized by dint of Claude Gosselin, director of the middle point International d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, a small, publicly stocked contemporary art center. Acting as the two biennale manager and art director, Gosselin scrambled to raise the nearly $1-million (US) packet from public and private sources. As is many times the case with new biennials, the volume of the money was not in place until individual month before the show's opening, with the flow that a number of invited foreign artists were unable to participate.

Despite these difficulties, however, Gosselin managed to gather 36 artists from 15 countries for the main exhibition, including of the like kind biennial regulars as Mariko Mori, Daniel Buren Tracey Emin and Rebecca Horn. For a visitor to Montreal, however, the greatest in quantity interesting aspect was the concentration of Canadian artists who are little known internationally.

Works were upon exhibit in various sites through every part of Montreal. The lion's share of the exhibition was at the middle itself, a storefront gallery in the heart of the city; the nearby Just For Laughs Museum, a cavernous three-story exhibition space which entertainers a well-known humor festival; and the Marche Bonsecours, a shopping mall and exhibition space facing Montreal's scenic riverfront. In addition, four artists created site-specific public works.

The main exhibition, titled "Le Capteurs de reves" occupied several different sites, making it somewhat difficult to conceptualize as a whole. The greatest in quantity interesting works in the exhibit which was said to be inspired by means of the Native American concept of the "dreamcatcher," were those which, with herculean echoes of Duchamp and Fluxus, achieved a poetic transformation of public objects and experiences.

The artist whose work greatest in quantity perfectly suited the spirit of the present to view was Ontario-based Kim Adams, who was exhibited by absurdist contraptions in sum of two units locations. Toaster Work Wagon featured a tricycle built for sum of two units whose riders were compelled to sit back to back, like Siamese twins forever straining to break away from each other. In The Gift Machine, Adams took this idea a pace further. Here two bicycles pointing in opposite directions formed the far extremitys of a long trainlike assemblage piled with colorful golf carts, duffle bags, umbrellas, ironing boards and lawn chairs. It resembl the baggage of a suburban refugee who was destined, thanks to the conflict between the sum of two units drivers, to go nowhere.

Equally brash were the gaudy constructions of the Ontario artist collection Fastwurms. Described as "a throw out to make visual art for a spacecraft holded and operated by Witches," the assemblage statuarys featured here merged a home-made Pop esthetic with molecular chemistry. Three tetrahedral forms in ascending size stood in a round pillar to form a space-age snowman. Yarn statuarys made loops on the wall, while a virid patchwork ball was topped with a cent witch's hat. The work was amusing if not terribly deep

The assemblage theme continued in Quebec artist Stephen Schofield's The Wealth of Taste, which included an enigmatic steel-tube constitution forming an armature for of that kind items as a vacuum cleaner, an organic configuration made of materialed fabric and an inflated, child-sized white shirt. Gilles Mihalcean, also from Quebec, delv plane further into absurdist transformations with a and zinc sculpture that resembled a cheese wedge improbably made from a car tire. by the agency of carving out the interior of another similar wedge, Mihalcean offered a cutaway view of a miniature subterranean forest with thick black tree bodys spreading beneath the plastic tire's exterior skin.

There was a quieter numbers in some of the works employing reduc scale. Quebec artist Jerome Fortin created floral-inspired jewelry without of bits of forks, nails, matches and cigarette point aimed ats Suggestive, thanks to its meager materials, of craft phenomenons made by prison inmates, Fortin's unconventional jewelry was arranged in vitrines like archeological finds. Charles LeDray, from the U s pursued his fascination with miniaturization, in Torn Suit, the forehead of one of his trademark tiny suits was torn away to reveal ragged layers of lining, vestment and shirt. However, the real exhibit stoppers were LeDray's other sum of two units works. Jewelry Display Window was a miniature theater stage lined with r velvety On close observation, the strangely shaped red-velvet forms arranged within the proscenium revealed themselves to be armatures for displaying jewelry, as in a store window. Equally magical was LeDray's Orrer'y,d, a tiny protoplast of the solar system carved from human bone