The artwork on display for the exhibit Intersections encourages the audience to reflect on what it means to be a senior in an urban environment. As the public and private identities of the participants expand to encompass a new senior status, questions of access, understanding, and infrastructure must be revisited. Scrutinizing their place in the city, the artists invite visitors to look closely and deeply, as in The Digital Literacy Project at Atwater Library‘s series, “Canada Under a Microscope,” or the photographs by residents of the HLM Durocher and Du Fort who share the view from where they stand on the streets of the city. Zooming out to reflect on the big picture, La Ruche d’Art Saint-Henri / The Saint-Henri Art Hive presents their vision of an ideal city built around a miniature model of the mountain, and the NDG Seniors’ Atelier contributes meaningful spaces and structures to the design. Flags made by members of AIDS Community Care Montreal hang high as a testament to pride and resilience. ACT‘s “Aging (wo)men + Their world” is a video installation that gives visitors a sense of time, while a gamepad co-designed for users with Parkinson’s disease will offer a sympathetic sense of touch.
The artists, researchers, and community members showcased here constitute an experiential journey through the inevitability of aging and the ambiguity of growing old. Within the predetermination of the city’s street map, this exhibit will serve as a reminder that each intersection both presents a choice, and serves as a progress marker on our journey.
St-Henri Art Hive
On Wednesday mornings, a group of friends meets around the long tables at the St-Henri Art Hive to share artistic techniques, personal stories, and their time with one another. The space, a nondescript storefront one block south of the highway, is unique in the city for its collectively-designed, shared garden in the back, its creative reuse centre in the basement, and, of course, for its remarkable community members, who often become friends. For “Intersections,” they were asked to reflect on how and where the city is important to them, both in their autobiographies and in their future lives. Primarily sculptural, the works on display from the Saint-Henri Art Hive are visual expressions of their feelings–both of frustration and affection—about the city they call home.
The Digital Literacy Project at the Atwater Library
The Digital Literacy Project is an initiative of the Atwater Library and Computer Centre, formed with the intention of providing Montreal seniors with new tools for self-expression. “Seeing Canada Under a Microscope” was a an experimental workshop facilitated by artist Melissa Tamporello for the senior community at the Atwater Library and Computer Centre. Seniors worked together to discover the mysteries of what objects look like when magnified 800x. Using footage of objects ranging from maple syrup to an aboriginal totem, seniors used video editing techniques to create experimental and narrative videos. Using sounds sourced from the internet and their own voices, they created a soundtrack for each video to add to the experience of viewing their work..
NDG Seniors’ Atelier
The energy of their activity room — a cool, bright space on the first floor of a residential building in the heart of NDG — is immediately welcoming. Each personality in this creative group stands strongly in support of the others: sharing tips, offering encouragement, and keeping a steady murmur of conversation going throughout the course of the afternoon. For “Intersections,” the artists of the NDG atelier are constructing their city from the ground up, considering the island’s distant geological past with a reproduction of the mountain that still affects their lives, as well as more recent topographies with whimsical skyscrapers.
HLM Durocher and Du Fort
Selected photos from the 2017 photography project “Interaction” will give visitors a chance to experience the city through the eyes of five amateur photographers as they sought to capture the meaningful moments, both mundane and monumental, in their daily lives.
AIDS Community Care Montreal
ACCM is a volunteer-driven community organization that provides support services and treatment information to people living with HIV/AIDS and/or hepatitis C. The voices of its members are central to ACCM’s guidance. The organization works in collaboration with many communities to build a compassionate and caring response to HIV and hepatitis C. Members of ACCM meet each Monday to eat together and share in a variety of experiences, from expert lectures to poster-making sessions. Over two of these sessions, the ACT team was welcomed into their fold to create logos that tell their story of aging in Montreal. These logos will be on display on flags, proudly representing an honest conversation from this diverse community. Intersectional in their very conception, they tell the stories of resilience, of the sadness of isolation and the joy of community, and of the journey of their lives from the viewpoint of people who stand in the middle of the narrative.
Aging, Communication, Technologies (ACT)
The research project ACT presents “Ageing (Wo)Men and their World” This exhibit will showcase the cross-cultural complexity of the ageing experience through a medley of still and moving images of elders in Montreal. It is a response to the limited (and often, white) representations of ageing in popular culture. Ageing (Wo)Men and their World will demonstrate the enthusiastic and active world of elders in Montreal and the different projects that they do, specifically their relationship to and with technology. Examples include: images of women taking photos of each other, or of themselves; women working on a documentary about saris; elders using electronic music technology; and, elders in various Montreal public spaces together. The images and videos will be a mix of already existing imagery from ACT-related members and of new imagery that will be taken specifically for this exhibition and deal more specifically with the intersection of innovation, technology, and the Ageing (Wo)Men and their World.