At the heart of this second cycle of our Frontière programmation, “Remix and Networks: Challenging Boundaries,” TOPO is hosting the installation from November 11 to December 19, 2020. Paysages de l’Anthropocène, by artist Oli Sorenson.
With this project, Sorenson embarks on a new body of work that borrows the neo-geo visual language of American artist Peter Halley to initiate a reflection on human activities that have a real ecological impact and generate multiple emergencies for our planet.
Adopting an aesthetic that oscillates between Peter Halley's early paintings, Instagram's square frames, Minecraft landscapes, Deleuze's imagination, and the ecological issues of the Anthropocene movement, Sorenson takes over the TOPO window display with an LED screen showing a multitude of abstract and figurative scenes illustrating the ubiquity of the networks that articulate and control our social relationships on a daily basis.
The artist attempts to represent these matrices that fuel the global economy, where land and sea routes are intertwined with fiber optics and oil pipelines, electrical cables and sewers, while the atmosphere is saturated with WiFi and Bluetooth waves, not to mention carbon pollutants and pesticides. These conduits and many others contribute to an acceleration of consumption flows at the heart of contemporary societies, particularly through the rapid obsolescence of technological instruments, which increases the accumulation of waste tenfold in the age of information networks.
As a whole, Paysages de l’Anthropocène includes a collection of geometric images on various media, including drawing, painting, as well as video and social media platforms Instagram, Vimeo, and Giphy.
The LED screens used by the artist come from Creative Lab, a Laval-based company specializing in the design of immersive video environments. A workshop is planned for spring 2021 with its director, Francis Aubin, a creator who has developed a customized range of event technologies for large-scale audiovisual installations.
Oli Sorenson
By exhibiting his digital works in venues associated with the visual arts, Oli Sorenson questions the status of the artist as a creator of unique, one-off objects. He highlights the contradictions between notions of authenticity and current means of mass reproduction in an era of digital image overload. In particular, he seeks to destabilize the idea that art is created in a vacuum, favoring gestures of quotation and creative appropriation. When he copies, transforms, and combines existing images by recognized artists, his works provoke confrontations between new images and familiar forms in order to interact more closely with the collective memory of art lovers who frequent galleries.
Oli Sorenson's remix art was first recognized in London (UK), where he participated in several media art events at the Institute of Contemporary Art (2003-06), Tate Britain (2006), and the British Film Institute (2008-10). He built an international profile with performances at ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2002), ISEA (Helsinki, 2004), and the Mapping (Geneva, 2009) and Sonica (Ljubljana, 2012) festivals. Based in Montreal since 2010, Sorenson has shown his work at Power Plant (Toronto, 2014), FILE (Sao Paulo, 2015), Monitoring (Kassel, 2017), Art Mûr (Berlin, 2018), Elektra (Montreal, 2019), and TOPO (Montreal, 2020, 2016).
