MONTREAL.- The Québec Triennial 2011. The Work Ahead of Us, one of the most important and highly anticipated art events of the season, was presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. For this second edition of the Triennial, the museum has put together a show on an unprecedented scale that fills all eight of its exhibition galleries and spill over into its indoor public spaces, as well as Place des Festivals in the Quartier des Spectacles and the Espace culturel Georges-Émile-Lapalme at Place des Arts. The exhibition features works by more than fifty artists and collectives, a majority of them young, who are contributing to a renewed Québec art. A series of live performances and Friday Nocturnes round out this edition of the Triennial.

Lengthy preparations: research, discussions, travels
Resembling an extensive research project, The Québec Triennial 2011 is the result of painstaking field work and deliberation by the Musée’s team of curators. To follow up their theoretical discussions, the curators travelled to different parts of the province, combing countless artists’ studios and arriving at a comprehensive sense of Québec artistic practice in these early years of the twenty-first century. This fundamental research effort has revealed, among other things, a shift toward the performative gesture in art that speaks of a new artistic sensibility, observable in the work of a number of artists in the Triennial. Also evident is the increasing presence of sound in contemporary art, as well as the renewed interest shown by many artists in the history of the art and ideas of the twentieth century. Finally, the findings of this research underscore the creative endeavour that is central to a vision of the art being produced here and how.

Chief Curator Marie Fraser and curators Lesley Johnstone, Mark Lanctôt, François LeTourneux and Louise Simard organized the exhibition; Marjolaine Labelle was in charge of coordination.

The artists of The Québec Triennial 2011
Everything in The Work Ahead of Us provides food for thought and an opportunity to step off the beaten path. Here are the artists taking part in the Triennial 2011-most of them from Québec’s young generation¾whose works promise to offer visitors brand-new experiences.

In the galleries: Numa Amun, Jean-Pierre Aubé, Magali Babin, Dean Baldwin, Steve Bates, Lorna Bauer, Sylvain Baumann and Florine Leoni, Mathieu Beauséjour, Sophie Bélair Clément, Matthew Biederman, Olivia Boudreau, Jacynthe Carrier, Marie-Andrée Cormier, Alexandre David, Jessica Eaton, Grier Edmundson, Julie Favreau, Claudie Gagnon, Massimo Guerrera, Nelson Henricks, Jim Holyoak and Matt Shane, Mark Igloliorte, Chris Kline, Thomas

Kneubühler, Valérie Kolakis, Stéphane La Rue, Fabienne Lasserre, Mathieu Latulippe, Frédéric Lavoie, François Lemieux, Emmanuelle Léonard, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Lynne Marsh, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, jake moore, François Morelli, Séripop, Charles Stankievech, Justin Stephens, [The User], Ève K. Tremblay and Myriam Yates.

Live program: 2boys.tv, Sylvie Cotton, Tim Hecker, Karl Lemieux, L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres, PME-ART, Dominique Pétrin and Georges Rebboh, and Martin Tétreault.

The Work Ahead of Us
The title “The Work Ahead of Us” is borrowed from an exhibition of work by Grier Edmundson, one of the artists in this Triennial. He himself took it from an essay by the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin. As the curators were discussing Edmundson’s singular, eclectic manner of juxtaposing disparate aspects of art and history, it came to them that this title was a natural choice for The Québec Triennial 2011. Indeed, The Work Ahead of Us aptly conveys the image of the vast range of artists, approaches, media and ideas that make up such an event. More concretely, the notion of work in the broad sense occurs in a number of pieces, whether in terms of research, information or data gathering, archiving, construction of pictorial, architectural or sound spaces, transformation, translation or transition from one state to another.