Montreal artist Michel de Broin, who won the Sobey Art Award earlier this week, is known increasingly for his mischievous interventions, deploying materials as diverse as paving asphalt, metal staircases, Plasticine and office furniture. Making strange with the everyday is his stock in trade, and much of what he does takes place outside the traditional confines of the gallery or museum.
His art is propelled by an impulse to disrupt habitual patterns and behaviours. Blue Monochrom (2003) is a dumpster lined in blue waterproof material and refitted as a Jacuzzi, available for gallery-goers. Hole (2002) is a white aluminum-clad mobile home with a giant orifice carved into its backside, smoothly modelled in white fibreglass and plaster. (De Broin parked the vehicle in the red-light district of Montreal, where it provided alternative lodging for lost souls.)
For an earlier work, from 2001, he created an imaginary cycle path beside the Lachine Canal in Montreal using 12 tons of asphalt. Instead of smoothly sweeping lines, however, the path's configuration was a knotted tangle, demarcated by an adjacent sign signalling the confusion ahead.
At times, de Broin's work is dynamic simply in its disruption of expectations. Revolutions, a public sculpture he made for Parc Maisonneuve-Cartier in Montreal in 2003, looks like a tightly coiled roller-coaster ride made from white metal spiral staircases, joined together in an infinite loop. (The piece was an homage to the vernacular domestic architecture of Montreal.) Keep on Smoking (2006), made during a residency in Berlin (where he now lives part-time), is a bicycle that produces smoke when it's pedalled.
Shared Propulsion Car (2005) is a stripped-down, engine-less Buick Regal '86 that has been retrofitted with pedals for smog-free locomotion. (The work will be on show in Toronto later this fall at Mercer Union.)
With a crew of four, it can travel up to 15 kilometres an hour, obstructing traffic while providing protection for the passengers within. "The vehicle's resistance to the culture of performance is raised to an unprecedented level," de Broin has said, and he has used it to create "beautiful traffic jams" in both Montreal and New York, where he drove the vehicle for two hours undisturbed by police. (Not so in Montreal, where the going record is five minutes.)
De Broin reflects a comic yearning toward a better, slower and more humane world, expressed in the current Sobey Art Award show in a sculpture titled Black Whole Conference (2006). He describes the work as a "utopic geometrical endosystem," but we see it as a sphere of connecting office chairs, all positioned facing inward, suggesting an ideal conference space in which there is no position of privilege to be found. Stepping back, this nomadic think tank looks like an intergalactic anemone, its multiple metal legs bristling.
Does de Broin want to change the world? Perhaps it's no surprise that his answer is surprising: "We should consider that what we call change as a natural process participates in a progressive and irreversible degradation of resources, slowly forwarding us to an inexorable end," he said in an interview earlier this year. "In that sense, it is probably better to not be held responsible for too much change."
Other contenders for this year's Sobey Art Award were Toronto artist Shary Boyle, Moncton artist Jean-Denis Boudreau, Rachelle Viader Knowles of Regina and Vancouver's Ron Terada.
Sobey Art Award 2007 will remain on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia until Dec. 2. 902-424-7542.