BGL

Québec City artist collective BGL is comprised of Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicholas Laverdière, who have been working together since 1996. Their large scale installations combine comedy and social critique, using humour as a means to engage audiences, to investigate the formal properties of installation and sculpture, and to address global and local political issues. Comedy is a well-known political strategy and form of protest; we find it currently most prevalent in popular television or on the web, and in art historical terms in the absurdities of Dada. In much the same way BGL use ridiculous puns, absurdist gestures or one-liners to address current social issues, most notably in relation to ecology and environmentalism. They do this by deftly blending popular culture references with art history. For their exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, they depict Johnny Cash’s burning ring of fire and the clichés of camping through the aesthetic constructs of Alexander Calder’s abstract hanging mobiles and floor stabiles.

It is no coincidence that BGL uses trees for their first solo exhibition in “Beautiful British Columbia,” where the natural environment is its most exploited resource, manufactured as product and marketed as lifestyle. For BGL the tree is a twofold symbol. It stands for Romanticism where as subjects, we build a relationship to nature. And the tree represents a breaking point where it is disembodied from nature and turned into product. The trees they used to build these pieces of a tree were already removed from nature and taken from their origin. They brought their own wood from Quebec into tree-rich BC.

Biography

BGL is an artist collective based in Québec City, and is comprised of three artists Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicholas Laverdière, who have been working together since 1996. They have exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Musée d’art moderne, Lille Métropole, France; and Mercer Union, Toronto. They participated in the 2007 Montrèal Biennial, and were finalists for the Sobey Art Award in 2006. In 2008 they exhibited as part of Caught in the Act at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and were commissioned by No. 9 to create a public art work in Toronto’s Don River. Their work has been featured in Canadian Art, Toronto and Parachute, Montreal. They are represented by Diaz Contemporary Art, Toronto and Parisian Laundry, Montreal.