"Two Way Street": The Photography Collective Fovea and the Tour de Villeneuve Project
By Anna Carlevari

The web of community ties formed within a city often coincides with the geographical boundaries of a neighbourhood, where proximity makes our daily activities conducive to exchange. Seeking to step out of traditional exhibition spaces, the Fovea collective has decided to approach the cohabitation of art and the community by placing it within this neighbourhood setting. Tour de Villeneuve, which takes place in shops or on particular streets of the Villeneuve street block, avoids the spectacular in order to discreetly infiltrate the daily life of the neighbourhood’s residents. The reason Fovea teamed up with the local shopkeepers is because they are the cornerstones of community activity. Their shop spaces, more intimate than those of department stores, foster interaction between individuals, and thus assure the perpetuation of communication.

Within the context of an in situ art, or more aptly a public intra-muros art approach, the artists sought inspiration in the particularities of each shop, and through their respective visions, tried to bring out the "spirit of the place". Some of the works are formally integrated into the space, sometimes to the point of being camouflaged, while others delve into the history of the shop and shopkeepers as their point of departure. Certain works invite contemplation, others call for manipulation, and some even become utilitarian objects. They all share an invocation of different aspects of memory. Reminiscence or amnesia, intimate or collective memory, the remembrance and evocation of a past that is more or less recent, and archival references are the avenues taken by the Fovea artists as they put their reflection on in situ photography to work.

Although the "society of the spectacle" has by now become a catchword, variously used to refer to a generalized notion of image overload, the concept continues to generate critical discussion by artists and theorists alike.1

In this respect, the photography collective Fovea's strategic move to bring photography to the streets is reflective of a need to address issues of media saturation and the role of photographic art in the public sphere. Coming out has permitted Fovea free circulation within the dissonance of signs and objects that proliferate the spaces of common culture. In doing so, the group raises questions about audience, as too about the nature of community, both inside and outside the traditional province of art.

Fovea's self-assigned mandate - to use the power of photography to interrupt, deflect, submerge the redundancy of images everywhere apparent — is accomplished by disentangling art from its institutional net and tossing it back into the stream of daily experience, come what may.

Since its inception in 1995, the collective has concentrated its efforts on the social relevance of photographic art, choosing to relocate photography from inside the safety of galleries to the open arena of life in the streets. This is clearly evident in both the current project and in recent collaborations where provocative posters mounted in public spaces were used to address the impact of photography in urban experience.2

Although Fovea's members are independently active, they come together as a group to articulate shared principles about what it means to be photographic artists. Their name - adopted from a word that identifies the centre of the retina where vision is most acute - was chosen precisely for its connotation of a heightened sense of perception,a metaphor for a critically engaged photographic practice. As a collective its history is situated within "new genre public art" which emerged as an integrated field of artistic activity in the 1980s. Since that time activist artists groups that use photography, such as the Docklands Community Project (London) and Urban Center for Photography (Chicago), have mobilized artists and communities to protest inadequate housing and deteriorating social services.3

In the Montreal context, antecedents can be located in the social documentary photography movement of the 1970s with groups such as PhotoCell, G.A.P., and G.P.P.4 With Tour de Villeneuve, however, Fovea takes a more circumspect approach. Not intended as sociological critique or intimate exposé, the project is marked by the group's willingness to share agency by bringing art to the viewer's doorstep rather than vice versa.

In Tour de Villeneuve, Fovea uses photography as an instrument of mediation, inviting shop owners and residents to join in a process-oriented venture that inevitably includes acts of translation and compromise. The interventionist aspect of the project has less to do with a political idea of social activism than with the group's desire to act as a conduit between private and public experience. In this sense, Fovea's focus is the space of culture, that is, the loci within which culture is produced through symbolic exchanges between the real and the unreal.

While the notion of "exchange" can be viewed from several perspectives - from the economic to the anthropological - Fovea's collective intent is more appropriately situated within the context of the creative process, theater, and the sense of trust engendered by playful encounters.5

For this reason each artist negotiated with the shop owners on a one-to-one basis and as a group produced a publication of hybrid nature, a cross between advertiser's brochure and art catalogue, which was hand-delivered to each door of the neighborhood. Because of the project's socially inclusive intentions, the publication, together with innovative "guided tours" produced in the spirit of a summer street fair, form significant conceptual extensions of the installations themselves. It is the structural inversion of public life, which fairs, carnivals and block parties facilitate, that Fovea attempts to emulate when it wrests art out of the gallery enclave and onto the sidewalks. In the end, all of the measures taken together contribute to the project's comprehensive character, a heterogeneity that reflects the individuality of the artists as well as the complexity of the neighborhood as a whole.

The Fovea artists know the rue Villeneuve neighborhood well. They walk and bicycle its streets, visit the summer fairs, shop for bagels, artists' paper and retro bric-a-brac. It is A propos perhaps that their current project, focused as it is on the small shops that line the streets of this neighborhood, should trace its title to a 19th century merchant named Léonidas Villeneuve.

Streets indispensable to the mythos of Montreal, legendary names such as rue Saint-Urbain and boulevard Saint-Laurent, converge here in the district of Mile End. Historically, Saint-Laurent has been the first home of the immigrant, the corridor along which generations of ethnicities have put down roots, many to move on to other parts of the city as fortune carried them elsewhere. Mile End remains primarily a residential area but today there are more younger people than older, more singles than married, more university-educated than not. The district's economic makeup is varied; young professionals, students, artists, and textile industry workers live in a provisional alliance otherwise known as metropolitan life.6 It is from this social and economic mix of peoples and histories, that Tour de Villeneuve has constructed its repertoire of visual inquiry.
The wearing down of memory is the unifying theme in the works of Suzanne Grégoire, Guy Mercier, Gail Paslawski, and Loren Williams.
Grégoire produces a meditation on the effects of ageing in her installation in the window of a stained-glass supply store. By transferring images of parts of bodies onto clear glass, Gr6goire brings together fragile surfaces, using the tracery of the glass to underscore the delicate veining of skin. Under the oppressive pressure of light and heat, the images seem to reduce human existence to a slow process of evaporation.
Paslawski and Mercier both chose to work in antiquarian shops where the artifacts of memory, now dislodged from their origins, are made available to new -owners seduced by a consumable and consuming past. Masked by their similarity to the surrounding memorabilia, Paslawski's works he concealed in drawers and boxes or disguised by golden frames.

Mercier's photo-sculptures mimic their environment; his use of mirrors produces a mise en abyme or doubling of object and image suggesting the collector's incessant fear of empty spaces and obsessive desire to swallow the world whole.

Loren Williams's cyanotypes of insects, plants and animals, are printed directly on small wooden blocks.
The faded blue images, whose subject is drawn from folk medicine and ancient medical remedies, grace the weathered shelves of a family-run pharmacy more than half a century old. The permanent display of antique tools of the apothecary's trade sets the museological context to Williams's work. More than a collection of specimens, the miniature images become the precious ingredients of an antique prescription.
Secrecy and dislocation reveal themselves in the works of Andrea Szilasi, Susan Coolen, and Eileen Leier. The disjunction between public and private space is evoked in Szilasi's outdoor installation.
A single, monumental image has been crudely pasted to an exterior wall of an alley that is dimly illuminated by a safety light. It is a photographic collage of an intimate scene between two figures whose physical reality is immersed in an atmosphere of floating abstract shapes. Enveloped by their own emotions and desires, Szilasi's figures draw attention to the idea of community as an intricate weave of private lives.
Coolen's transparencies of moths and cocoons function as a metaphor for protection and privacy. She has hung these from tree branches so that they hover overhead like precarious creatures of unknown taxonomies. At night, under the illumination of street lamps and window displays, they become transformed into tiny beacons of light. They invite the viewer to take note of the unseen, intimate spaces that configure this neighborhood.
They suggest to us, the passersby, that we win never know the poignant truths of the private lives that inhabit this place.
Leier's large prints of trees, wrapped in cloth in protection against winter's cold, suggest new mutant forms of life. Their anthropomorphic shapes find an easy parallel to Coolen's soft animal forms. Leier has digitally printed images of the trees on diaphanous cloth and hung them inside a reproduction service center. While they may allude to notions of healing and safety, they also offer a sardonic commentary on the "packaging" of nature in the techno-urban environment.
If nomadism is the pre-eminent postmodern condition then the works of Nicolas Amberg and Steve Leroux attest to this.

Amberg's photo-postcards, which are displayed in a health food store, make an appeal to the senses and to bodily pleasures, disregarding the "high anxiety" of urban life in favour of elementary satisfactions. But the self-addressed, stamped postcards will not travel far, in fact, their origin and destination will be the same. The short orbit of their journey has less to do with the epic migrations of Mile End's old immigrants than with the pluralist nature of cosmopolitan cultural life today.
Leroux's series obliquely allude to the cult and industry of today's new "vagabondism" and the explosive growth of Montreal's bicycle culture. Displayed in a bicycle shop, the images show the disorienting landscapes created by human peripheral vision as the body projects itself through space. Leroux's riders may be tourists on cultural excursion or urbanites on escape from cultural overload, either way they suggest the urban bike rider may be the new flaneur.
In contrast, life slowed down to stillness is the subject of the installations by Danielle Hébert and Eva Quintas.

They draw our attention to the city's empty pockets of time such as those spent lining up at a checkout counter or waiting for clothes to dry in a public laundromat. Hébert's intimate photographs, discreetly displayed throughout a small grocery store, do not show significant events or dramatic moments. Instead we have glimpses of quotidian experience, the artist's record of the ordinariness of life.

Outside the store window Hébert has constructed an aluminum bench papered with an image of a city night scene illuminated by a street lamp. We are invited to pause, to reflect on the small details that sink to the bottom of consciousness only to resurface at unexpected moments.

Quintas also looks at the spaces of community traffic, in this case, the local laundromat. The public laundry is that paradoxical urban space where one does nothing else, it seems, but wait, filling up time with reading and daydreams, or simply staring in vacuous silence at a vortex of spinning colour. But Quintas has elected to join the prosaic to the sacred; she has integrated text and image in a metaphorical play on ideas about dreaming and cyclical renewal.

Based in part on the artist's longstanding friendship with the Indo-Canadian family who operates the enterprise, the work develops into a lyrical reflection on contemporary spirituality.

The symbolic function of clothing is the focus of the installations by Alain Chagnon and Élène Tremblay.
Chagnon's trio of large photographs that hang like banners in a textile yardage store show head and shoulders shots of three pedestrians, wearing a hood, a turban, and a cowboy hat. What becomes clear here is that however much clothes may serve utilitarian needs, they are also markers of cultural difference. The Mile End district as it is today, a mix of Old World tradition and alternate lifestyle hipness, has produced a pluralism of dress and style which Chagnon's amused eye reveals in his work.
Tremblay, on the other hand, has chosen to narrow her focus to a particular image of femininity. In the window of a clothing store for "full-figured women", the artist has displayed a dressmaker's mannequin upon which she has assembled a "dress" of photographs. The images were collected from found photo albums and show partial views of faded snapshots of women's lives - fragments of bodies, glimpses of landscape and domestic interiors.

In the window a frieze of small photographs unfolds a collective biography. In cinematic form we are shown a diversity of expressions, lifestyles, and body types weighted by woman's experience and time's unwinding.

The burden of historical memory on Villeneuve street and its surrounding neighborhoods is apparent. Traces of generational and cultural fractures are in evidence; shops that have been family-run for decades close down, new gentry move in to claim a readymade past.

Rue Villeneuve is a neighborhood explicit in its signs of historical transition. But it is the area's appearance of being an assemblage of singular details, a mix of epochs and cultures, that gives the neighborhood its vitality. This is the same idea argued by urban economist Jane Jacobs when she writes "a lively city scene is lively largely by virtue of its enormous collection of small elements."

Basing her work on ecological models, she has said of cities that "the self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not by failure", an ironic observation on the homogeneity produced by unchecked expansion which empties city neighborhoods of their idiosyncrasies and signs of historical difference.7

In some sense, the Villeneuve neighborhood itself seems also to hesitate between the new and the obsolete, precariously poised between remembering and forgetting. The current project by Fovea is, simply put, an offer made by one community to trace the body and memory of another - a modest but not insignificant gesture in the furious shuffle that makes up the spectacle of city life.8

1. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: editions Buchet-Chastel, 1967).

2. Fovea provides a darkroom, work and exhibition space, and support to visiting artists; recent projects include: Dans la rue / In the Street (1995, Montreal) and Parties intimes / Private Parts (1997, Montreal and Edinburgh); members Jocelyne Alloucherie and Franck Michel did not participate in the current project; Fovea grew out of the earlier photographers' group "Atelier Vox" (formed 1985).

3. Suzanne Lacy, ed, Mapping the Terrain, New Genre Public Art (Bay Press: Seattle and Washington, 1995).

4. Serge Allaire, "Une tradition documnentaire au Québec? Quelle tradition? Quel documentaire?" Le Mois de la Photo A Montréal (Montréal: 1993); Fovea member Alain Chagnon at one time belonged to G.P.P. (Groupe des photographes populaires).

5. See writings by psychoanalytic ("object relations") theorist D.W. Winnicot.

6. The project covers a quadrilateral area bounded by the streets Villeneuve and Saint-Laurent and bordering districts Plateau Mont-Royal on the east and Outremont on the west.

7. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House: New York and Toronto, 1961).

8. The title of this essay is adapted from Walter Benjamin's "One Way Street", originally published in German in 1928.