Fellow Canadian Guy Laramee was previously featured on the Sifter back in Jaunary. Laramee is an incredibly talented artist with a broad range of skills from painting and sculpting; to music, composition and stage direction.

In his two latest series entitled Guan Yin and El amor por las montanas, Laramee’s remarkable landscape book is on full display.

Represented by Galerie Lacerte, please enjoy this stunning collection below. An artist statement and biography can also be found amidst the gallery. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The erosion of cultures – and of “culture” as a whole – is the theme that runs through the last 30 years of my artistic practice. Cultures emerge, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might ask so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts?
 
When I was younger, I was very upset with the ideologies of progress. I wanted to destroy them by showing that we are still primitives. I had the profound intuition that as a species, we had not evolved that much. Now I see that our belief in progress stems from our fascination with the content of consciousness. Despite appearances, our current obsession for changing the forms in which we access culture is but a manifestation of this fascination.
 
My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “ All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “what” we think, but “that” we think.
 
So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.
After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: to project us into this thick “cloud of unknowing.” – Source: GuyLaramee.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guy Laramée is an interdisciplinary artist who, in the course of his 30 years of practice, found his way through numerous disciplines such as: stage writing, stage directing, contemporary music writing, musical instrument design and building, singing, video, scenography, sculpture, installation, painting and literature.
 
He graduated the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He holds a Master degree in Visual Arts at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and a Master degree in Anthropology at l’Université Concordia (Montréal). He founded the internally acclaimed music ensemble TUYO. He received more than 25 grants and was awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts the Joseph S. Stauffer award for musical composition. He worked with prestigious collaborators such as Robert Lepage (Québec), Volker Hesse (Zurich), Rachel Rosenthal (Los Angeles) and Larry Tremblay (Montreal).
 
His work has been seen and heard across Canada, United States, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Latin America. Since 2000, the artist works almost exclusively in the field of visual arts. His ongoing BIBLIOS project, involving the carving of books and commenting on our obsessive pursuit of knowledge, has won him national and international acclaim (New York, Boston, Toronto, Montreal and Québec).
 
The artist has presented several group and solo exhibitions such as Le Nuage d’inconnaissance at la Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine (Trois-Rivières) in 2008, at the Toronto International Art Fair (Ontario) from 2007 – 2009 and at la Grande Bibliothèque for the opening exhibition in 2005. He will be presenting his sculptures in 2009 at the Bellevue Art Museum (Washington). His works can be found in the collections of Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec, Ex Machina (Quebec), Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, Loto-Québec, Allan Chasanoff (New York), and numerous private collections. – Source: Galerie Lacerte