[Summer 2023]
By Philippe Depairon
Musée McCord Stewart, Montréal
16.09.2022 — 22.01.2023
[Excerpt]
How do we remember the recent COVID-19 pandemic? And what do we remember?
In a recent issue of Ciel variable, Michel Hardy-Vallée underlined, behind the Legault government’s injunction to take walks (for our health) and stay home (for the health of others), the complexity underlying the limits, “even apparently insignificant,” of the banal.1 Michel Huneault invites us also to examine the “sociology of common sense” and recollection through images in his exhibition Incipit – COVID-19. The thirty or so photographs on display are a selection from among the thousands taken by Huneault, who was commissioned by the McCord Stewart Museum to document the experience of the pandemic in Montreal between April and August 2020, the “incipit” of the title. This “fieldwork” seems to have been a logical extension of Huneault’s body of work, as in his previous series he explored the inscription of human beings in the landscape through environmental and social catastrophes, such as the earthquake and tsunami that struck Tōhoku, Japan, in 2011, and the train derailment at Lac-Mégantic in 2013…
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Michel Huneault Incipit – COVID-19 — Philippe Depairon ]