The Fabrication of Reality

The title of the exhibition presented at the Horace Gallery is drawn from a work by astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan entitled: Chaos and Harmony. In this book, the author explains how the construction of reality arises from the encounter between the “stable” laws of physics and unpredictable “accidents.” How our universe, our planet, our “reality,” are a mixture of determinism and accidents. In this work, Trinh Xuan Thuan, who is also a Buddhist, asserts the necessity of intuition, the sense of beauty, imagination, poetry, and philosophy to, for example, conceive a theory like relativity or to understand life. Formally, Rosalie D. Gagné explores structures of a rather organic character, drawing inspiration from forms present in nature while abstractly referencing the body. She is interested in what is identifiable without necessarily being recognizable. In this exhibition, the viewer is invited to interact with the artwork and to share the artist’s questioning: Can art be constituted by attention itself? Can it be the manipulation of attention itself, the development of a greater awareness of “ordinary” phenomena and things, thus transforming our life and our perception of present, past, and future experiences?

— Excerpt from the press release of 02/28/208 written by Catherine Longpré, coordinator of the Horace Gallery.