SITEGEIST - THE SPIRIT OF A PLACE – Ciel variable Magazine

Artworks created as part of the fund-raising campaign
SITEGEIST – THE SPIRIT OF A PLACE (2012-2013)

The goal of this project, which took place during the magazine’s first fundraising campaign, was to create original artworks that would convey the spirit of places chosen by the participating collectors.

Based on the idea of matching up a collector and an artist, the project offered a unique opportunity to collectors who love contemporary art to come into closer contact with artists and their creative worlds. During the meetings, collectors were able to express personal resonances attached to a place and discuss the reading that the artist was inspired to make to transpose these resonances into his or her creative world.

Rather than simply the acquisition of an existing artwork, our project thus proposed a unique experience – considering that artists and collectors meet quite rarely – and resulted in a series of new and surprising artworks.

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The artists Angela Grauerholz, Alain Paiement, Chuck Samuels, Gabor Szilasi, Luc Courchesne, and Evergon supported the magazine by contributing their talents.

And the collectors Charles Lapointe, François R. Roy, Alexandre Taillefer, Debbie Zakaib, Phyllis Lambert, and Thomas Marcantonio contributed to the campaign by acquiring the resulting artworks.

The spirit of a place: An unexpected, amusing image of a place that is otherwise banal, a fragmented view of a domestic environment saturated with artworks, plays on reflection within a camera in counterpoint with a simulated self-portrait, photographic transposition of the first representation of the modern horizon, and finally, an impromptu full-length portrait taken in the studio – these are some of the visions of the spirit of a place that resulted from the project.

Chuck Samuels and Gabor Szilasi, DANS L’ŒIL DE L’AUTRE – for Alexandre Taillefer and Debbie Zakaib

Having known each other for at least thirty years, Gabor Szilasi and Chuck Samuels seized the opportunity to work together for the first time after being selected individually by Alexandre Taillefer and Debbie Zakaib for the Sitegeist project. Their aim was to produce two separate but linked works, each one issuing from their distinct approach to image-making and created to ...
Chuck Samuels and Gabor Szilasi, DANS L’ŒIL DE L’AUTRE – for Alexandre Taillefer and Debbie Zakaib

Having known each other for at least thirty years, Gabor Szilasi and Chuck Samuels seized the opportunity to work together for the first time after being selected individually by Alexandre Taillefer and Debbie Zakaib for the Sitegeist project. Their aim was to produce two separate but linked works, each one issuing from their distinct approach to image-making and created to ...
Alain Paiement, DÉTAILS OBLIQUES – for François R. Roy

Nous nous sommes rencontrés dans sa demeure. D’un étage à l’autre, je découvre une collection d’œuvres qui traduit la vision particulière de celui qui les a rassemblées. Les œuvres coexistent parmi tant d’autres objets, matériaux et surfaces tout aussi particulières. Des tissus, des pièces de verre, des boiseries…

Nous avons discuté de sites et d’espaces significatifs, pour l’un et l’autre. Dans ...
Angela Grauerholz, DEUX PRISES – for Charles Lapointe

I had to laugh when I first saw the couch and the two white plugs right smack in the middle of the pink wall. There were other elements that contributed to this impromptu mise en scène – a mini Christmas tree with lights, a column painted in loud green and yellow, a bunch of purple chairs – to take a ...
Luc Courchesne, L’INVENTION DE L’HORIZON – for Phyllis Lambert

Ma découverte, il y a une dizaine d’années, de la « vue circulaire » depuis le sommet du mont Buet, imaginée par Horace-Bénédict de Saussure et exécutée par Bourrit en 1776, fut une révélation. La formule anamorphique qu’il a mise au point pour ce dessin correspond exactement à celle que j’utilise depuis 1999 pour enregistrer, en une seule prise de ...
Evergon, SPIRIT IN ALL PLACES – for Thomas Marcantonio

This has been a difficult summer in a difficult year. My mother, my live-in partner of seven years, died at ninety-three years of age, very unexpectedly, at the end of April, and I took a big man’s fall in the Gaspé on the first day of my August vacation, bruising my good eye and leaving my body full of creaking ...

We would like to thank the collectors, as well as the numerous artists and gallery owners, who agreed to support the magazine by participating in this campaign. We extend our thanks to our partner ENCADREX, which generously provided framing services, as well as to Mélanie Boulanger, for her valuable advice during the preparation of the campaign.