15 Restless Nights is an exhibition of large-scale images of reconstructed unmade hotel beds, plus a noir-like soundtrack with 15 moments by author Diane Schoemperlen in French and English about anonymous nights spent in different cities in motels. This exhibition is a collaborative project between the artist and those who worked on the sound piece including a writer, a music composer, five voices, a translator, and a Jazz Trio. The images of rumpled motel beds hang on a high tech outdoor industrial veil scrim material and hang freely from the top, allowing the veils to move slightly, like breathing. For the course of a year, Besant traveled across Canada spending every night in a different motel and photographing the unmade beds in adjacent rooms every morning.
MORE INFO
15 Restless Nights
April 8 to May 13, 2010
ARTIST: Derek Besant
OPENING: Friday, April 16 at 5pm
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Derek Michael Besant is well known for his unorthodox use of materials and technology in creating exhibitions, installations and collaborations as a Canadian artist. The hybrid forms he realizes often include soundtracks that relate to his themes of memory, language, and the body as metaphor.
The dislocation of the figure often haunts his imagery, whether he explores the themes of Sleep, Dreams, Migration, Forgetting, Falling, Silence, Reflection or Submersion. The physical / psyche balance is always in question in Besant’s projects, from his illusion in the form of a 50 foot high mural of a pinned veil on a building façade, a transported 115 foot high Waterfall to the heart of Toronto’s Banking District, two mammoth steel chairs balanced on one another or a stretch of prairie sky arching over six lanes of traffic; his public art pieces always take on their own life within the setting they are integrated into.
Besant’s exhibitions in museums are often constructed around the ephemeral underpinnings of a concept without answers… only questions. Figures blur into oblivion, fall out of reach into nothing, leave their impressions in unmade motel bed sheets or sink below surfaces in poetic choreographed movements accompanied by strange soundscapes. These audio works including voice patterns reconstructed as water, train stations and freeways from London to Tokyo, bird and insect territorial calls erased by wind, or overheard partial phone conversations. But there is always a connection to the tactile materiality and the breath of whatever subtle gestures are investigated in his work.
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Gallery Connexion is an artist-run center in Fredericton, NB and presents contemporary art practices, including visual, performance, music, literary, and inter-disciplinary art. Gallery Connexion is seeking an Executive Director who is a creative innovator, has a passion for the visual arts and is committed to high quality, dynamic programming. As the successful candidate you will [...]
Artists and curators are invited to submit proposals for upcoming exhibitions in the Rick Burns Gallery, Gallery Connexion’s main exhibition space. Proposals will be for March 2013 to February 2014 programming. Deadline for proposals: March 31, 2012. Email submissions must be received by 9pm. Post submissions (on CD/DVD only) must be postmarked by the deadline [...]
Gallery Connexion’s Annual General Meeting will be held at 7 pm on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at Gallery Connexion, 440 York Street, Fredericton, NB (entrance from the main parking lot at the junction of Victoria and York Streets) Please join us for a review of the past year’s activities, an overview of the year to [...]
