Rewind: Alain Paiement
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
Archival photos from the Canadian Centre for Architecture's collection have been recycled into a new artwork by Montreal's Alain Paiement for this show. Best known for the structures that he builds incorporating actual photographs, Paiement also sifted through the CCA's collection and chose photos documenting architectural structures and projects using the modernist materials of glass and steel. The centrepiece here took those selected photos and integrated them into a transparent curved wall.
Paiement's archival wall assemblage included some key documentary photographs from 20th-century history. It showed an unknown photographer's record of Vladimir Tatlin constructing his first maquette for Monument to the Third International, student maquettes and studies with pure structural designs, the Eiffel Tower under construction in Paris, even anonymous photos of a model for the Lenin Institute and Library in Moscow. The choreographed imagery of the show, titled tangent e, recontextualized visual architectural records from a range of historical periods within a structure that was in itself an architecture of a kind.
Another work, Fractal Palace, incorporated images of construction workers and the coloured glass wall extension for the Palais des congrès in downtown Montreal. With hexagonal shapes that give the work a honeycomb look, the images overlap with one another. Paiement's optical collage, like a prismatic beehive, emblematizes progress and the frenetic activity accompanying an inner-city building boom. Spiroscope (2002), a Lambda digital, gelatin-mounted colour print, simply depicts a spiral of glass and aluminum at Montreal's Place des Arts.
All of the documents in the show are brought to life by Paiement's selection, re-situation and relocation of them. Previous architects and artists who have taken part in the Canadian Centre for Architecture's ongoing project series include Cedric Price, Irene Whittome, Peter Smithson and Herzog & de Meuron. And while Paiement designed his show with CCA documents, his exhibition was in turn designed by the Montreal-based architectural collective Atelier in situ, a group contracted by the centre and known for its own conceptual approach to architecture.
Spring 2004
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