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A unique experience of the light, the shadow and the space that surround us

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Published
06/25/2017 by

Le Musée d'art contemporain (MAC) is pleased to welcome, for the first time within its walls and for the first time in a solo exhibition in Canada, the internationally acclaimed Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson will be presenting Multiple shadow house, a highly participatory and immersive experience where the spectators become central to each piece. From June 21 to October 9, 2017, the MAC invites visitors to literally enter into the artist's work and experience installations that blend light, movement and spatial exploration.

A leading figure in the contemporary art scene, Olafur Eliasson has exhibited large-scale installations all over the world, taking over public spaces as well as galleries and museums to interrogate our relationship with the world, the environment, time and space. Since the mid-1990s, in collaboration with his studio in Berlin, he produces devices that engage the mechanisms we use to perceive light and natural phenomena.

By means of spare and immaterial works that investigate the body, movement and the perception of self and the environment, Olafur Eliasson puts the spectator in the centre of his creations. Rather than simply observing the work, spectators discover that their presence completes it and they become active players. In this way, many of his installations guide our attention not only to what we see, but also to the way in which we look, creating what the artist calls situations of "seeing yourself seeing."

Following the same lines that underlie Eliasson's practice, this exhibition at the MAC will feature a selection of important works that will enable visitors to appreciate the exceptional process of this unique artist.

A World of Water and Light

The work resulting from Olafur Eliasson's practice is often, by its very nature, intangible: the play of light, optical illusions, scientific principles and weather elements are key components of his installations. In this exhibition, water and light figure especially prominently.

The exhibition opens and closes with two pieces in which water creates effects of light that in turn evoke opposing time frames: Big Bang Fountain, 2014, uses a strobe light to transform a jet of water into an ephemeral sculpture, while Beauty, 1993, presents the luminous apparition of a shifting rainbow that appears in a curtain of fine mist falling through a beam of light. The first work produces a fast-moving, apparently endless and constantly changing sequence of momentary compositions, while the second is a continuous but elusive effect that can only be seen when the spectator moves into a certain position.

The exhibition's central work that lends its title to the exhibition, broadly explores the visitor's relationship with architecture and light. Multiple shadow house, 2010, is a free-standing "house" where the walls are screens. On both sides of these walls, the shadows of visitors are cast from different angles, in a range of colors. The installation reproduces the minimalism of the museum space while allowing visitors to see the incidental and ephemeral shadow-play created by other visitors behind seemingly opaque walls.

Your space embracer, 2004, newly acquired by the MAC, explores light in another way by providing an experience where light hitting a suspended ring is indirectly projected onto the walls and ceiling of a room. A little like a magician revealing his secrets, Eliasson here shows the surprising result of an effect of light along with the structure that creates it.


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