Paul Landon:
Transcanadienne
Galleria Huuto Jätkäsaari 1
10.5.–25.5.2014
Paul Landon is interested in the forgotten and overlooked sites of the international modern project. Details of architecture and urban design, gardens and landscapes, maps, diagrams and film sets have been explored in his recent work. Representing and reconstructing these as drawings, photographs, texts and films, Landon stages these sites as indexes of abandonment of a utopian vision.
For his exhibition in the Jätkäsaari space at Galleria Huuto, Landon turns his focus to the lost modernist ideals of his Canadian homeland, manifested in the overlooked interstices of the urban landscape of his adopted city of Montréal. Transcanadienne is a multi-channel video projection showing the landscaped no-man’s land that is a feature of much of the city’s periphery. Named after the Trans-Canada Highway (in French Autoroute Transcanadienne) that passes through Montréal, the work shows the decaying modern architecture of the factories and warehouses lining this freeway in the city’s western suburbs.
Conceived for the Jätkäsaari space, itself a former warehouse, the stillness of the emptied buildings shown in Transcanadienne is emphasized by subtle movements in the static video images. The stillness is experienced as of waiting, waiting for time to pass, waiting for the future to arrive.
Paul Landon has exhibited his videos and installations in museums in Canada, in galleries and other venues in North America and Europe and in festivals around the world. Landon graduated from The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada and from the Jan van Eyck Academie in The Netherlands. Paul Landon lives and works in Montréal, where he is a professor of Media Arts at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques of UQÀM, and sporadically in Helsinki, where he is a candidate for a Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.
Landon’s recent research has been presented in symposia and conferences in Montréal, Gothenburg, Riga and Buenos Aires and his practice in exhibitions in Stockholm, Montréal and in Helsinki where he exhibited at Galleria Huuto in 2011. Paul Landon is a founding member of the Hexagram media arts research group in Montréal and a current recipient of a Kone Foundation Researcher Grant.
