Housebound : Portraits From the Winter Garden
March 11 - April 29, 2017
Galerie Trois Points is pleased to present the portraits of Evergon’s winter garden which offers a brand new series of photographs from March 11 to April 22. Cultivated in intimacy and collegiality, these new works belong to the private space of the house as much as of the interior life. They unfold as a place of weariness and of courage, in complicity, humor and sometimes melancholy.
As part of this new series, Evergon and Jean-Jacques Ringuette have produced more than thirty portraits of indoor plants, lady-plants to whom they confides during watering times; friends with whom they are delighted to gossip with about the man walking down in the street or carry on about private scandals and tristesse. Also a form of reminiscence, they are all at once; their mothers, their grandmothers, their former loves and their best friends.
For years, Evergon has traveled the world in search of Ramboys, Cruising Grounds or creating the Homo-Baroque / Homo-Rococo series in the Polaroid studios of New York, Boston and Frankfurt. In recent years, the artist’s health forced him to retire into his house and studio, confined: housebound. Weakened but still driven by the need to create, in an act of defiance and remembrance, Evergon began working in tandem with Jean-Jacques Ringuette (former student, friend, and model, notably for the Ramboys series). From objects accumulated over the years as reanimated memories, they created a series of still lifes painterly alike titled “Two Old Friends Play Chess”, which we presented a year ago. The two danced around each other, they parried, they counter-charged, trumped each other as queen fiends – “no time for a king” says Evergon! It was a courtship of physicality, equality, creativity and good fun.
Evergon lives and works in Montreal where he taught at Concordia University. His work has been widely presented throughout Canada (Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Montreal, Winnipeg, Fredericton) and the United States (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles), but also in China (Shanghai), in Italy (Turin, Milan, Florence, Rome, Bologna), Great Britain (London, New Castle), Germany (Franckfurt), Australia (Syndey) and France (Paris). His works can be found in several private and public collections, such as the National Gallery of Canada, The Photographer’s Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Princeton Collection, the Musée de la photographie (Charleroi, Belgium), the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Musée de l’Élysée (Lausanne, Switzerland) and the National Museum of Photography (Bradford, England), to name but a few.