POOLS

Interdisciplinary artist Pierre Tremblay came to the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University as an Associate Professor after twelve years in Paris where his work can be found in the collections of the Musée Carnavalet, Bibliothèque nationale and the Musée Rodin. He has also taught at the Parsons School of Design in Paris. His artistic practice, combining new technologies and video, questions the world in flux, how we see and perceive. Recent projects include 300 Days of Indulgence – Negotiating with the Beyond, Continuum and Portraits in a Sentence. Exhibitions of recent note include Meta Incognita at The Photographers’ Gallery – The Wall, London, England, Dans la nuit des images, at the Grand Palais, Paris and le Mois de la Photo, Montreal, along with festival screenings in Canada, Italy, Australia, China and Brazil. In his role at Ryerson, Tremblay has facilitated conferences and edited books that have brought scholars and artists from Ontario, Quebec and France together for cross-cultural exchange on a variety of new media topics.

Artist’s Statement:
My exhibition, Pierre Tremblay: Pools, developed in part during a residency in Iceland (Winter 2015) was curated by Sara Knelman. It had a first public showcase a one-night event, one-hour screening of selected new video work in an empty pool – the Ryerson swimming pool – on 4 May, 2016. It also involved additional projection, live musical accompaniment and readings.

The one-hour screening showed a sequence of twelve short films made with a GoPro camera while swimming in different pools around the world. Constructed as New Media visual poems, each film is crafted with original music by a number of Canadian composers and one Icelandic composer, two of whom performed at the event. I also collaborated with Nancy Campbell, an Oxford, England based writer who has written two poems specifically for the films.