Cooke-Sasseville: Le plus beau jour de ma vie

Exhibition

August 25 – September 23, 2006
Meet the artists on Saturday September 16 & 23 at 3pm

Project Description

In the relentless stream of days that make up our everyday lives, can a single day hope to surpass all others in quality? Has the happiest day of my life already gone by, or has it not yet arrived? How do you quantify happiness?

The special 2006-2007 season, which invites artists to respond to the proposition As If All Were Well, begins grandly with Cooke-Sasseville’s installation Le plus beau jour de ma vie (“the best day of my life”). The artist duo concocted a fantastical, hallucinatory vision imbued with questions of desire, happiness, and hope. Presented for the first time in November 2004 at L’Œuil de Poison, the installation sets itself up as an absurd monument to the impossible quest for happiness.

Led on a path strewn with signals referring to everyday life, spectators are brought to reexperience the oft-visited sense of drabness engendered by routine. The banal profusion of signage is counteracted, however, by a “revelation” that takes shape in a whelming embrace between two giant creatures in the centre of a clearing; the outsize scale testifies to the grandeur of the event — or to the outrageousness of the situation. Yet this agreement between two beings can only take place if each accepts to be sized up by the other, to see him or herself in the eyes of the other. A clear proposition in fantastical disguise, to be read in the manner of fables that stage animal characters in order to convey politically weighted messages.

In the smaller hall, the artists present a work titled Vous faites pitié à voir (“you are a pitiful sight”), an imposing and scornful self-portrait that takes the sacrosanct artistic trilogy to task: that is, the artist, the work, and the spectator.