Guillaume Adjutor Provost
Soleils
about
Guillaume Adjutor Provost works and lives in Montreal, Canada. He is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, textile, performance, collaborative structures and poetry. He holds a Ph.D. in Arts Studies and Practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal where he wrote a thesis on the notion of curatorial art, namely the use of curatorial approaches as a mode of creation and of collaboration between practices. Thus, he fully considers the exhibition as a space for experimentation, critical reflection and self-determination. His projects fuse various sources together, trying to tap into a social unconsciousness and forming a meaningful narrative. He is interested in exploring the periphery of what makes history: the counterculture, personal archives, queer experiences, Quebec vernacular imagery, and science fiction. Recipients of grants from the Quebec Council for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman scholarship, his projects have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and Europe.
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Soleils [Suns] is a video work based on the compilation of all the written and published sentences of the French writer Émile Zola which contain the word sun. This collection of sentences is reordered to create the story of a day, from sunrise to its decline. Through this literary cut-up, appears a composite female character who maintains a game of seduction with the star. The video is built around a revolution of the sun, the colours of which are determined by the descriptions of the luminous temperature that Zola wrote. At the end of the day, a dream composed of solar hallucinations gives access to the female character’s unconscious. In sum, the editing process reveals the subliminal nature of writing and how it can be infused with intuitive passages.
The Soleils project was completed during a creative residency at Maisons Daura in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie (France) between September 14 and October 27, 2017, thanks to the support of 3e impérial, centre d’essai en art actuel (Granby, Quebec) and la Maison des Arts Georges et Claude Pompidou (Cajarc, France), as well as the support of le Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.