Creation and destruction, harmony and discord, refinement and brute force—these are some of the tensions that abound in “Vertigo,” an exhibition of sculptural works by Montreal artist Maskull Lasserre currently on view at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. In the show’s opening work, Coriolis, an upright piano sits in the middle of the gallery, its top crushed in by a massive boulder. Only on closer inspection does it become clear that the piano is actually a rusted steel simulacrum, an illusion of tradition, both musical and sculptural, rendered mute by the force of nature. Lasserre further disorients expectation in the gallery’s back space, where a suite of intricately hand-built musical-sculptural hybrids—a violin punctured by a sabre-toothed skull, the disembodied apparatus of a piano, a stringed attachment for a .357 revolver and a meat cleaver revamped as a stringed instrument—measure a humanist’s attachment to beauties of form and reason against the hard reality of humanity’s destructive inclinations and the fragility of existence.

Maskull Lasserre Six Shot – Six String 2010 Detail

Maskull Lasserre Sonata Blade 2010 Detail