Both of us were dreamers, young love in the Sun
by Marc-Olivier Hamelin
Exhibition statement
Utilizing both the indoor and outdoor spaces of the coop, Marc-Olivier Hamelin staged the exhibition as if it were an intimate, domestic living space whose occupants have just undergone significant life changes. Inside, we find empty and partly finished water bottles, socks and underwear, used tissues, books, personal trinkets, diaristic photographs, and more – all puzzle pieces to sift through. There is a hauntological, deeply affective charge to the space that ultimately prompts us to consider the complicated, nuanced understanding of value given to these myriad objects left in the aftermath.
Both of us were dreamers, young love in the Sun (which takes its title from the Spice Girls’ “Viva Forever”) also holds an undercurrent of eroticism wherein the leftover objects (shoes thrown in the corner, underwear, tissues, etc.) may just as easily be read as markers of pleasure as they may otherwise be read as signs of illness. Upon entering the coop, we immediately notice the minty smell of Tiger Balm, steeping us further into the mysterious world of Hamelin’s installation.
The anti-presence of this work means that the absence of the person(s) whose things we are seeing is the very thing that attaches meaning to them, and the haunting remnant traces prompt us to feel something or someone that is not actually present – like a ghost. However, the engagement of viewing the works onsite and processes of documentation reinsert presence to the space, infilling the void of absence. We then become the spectres instead: moving through someone else’s intimate space, watching, looking.
Something rather unusual began to unfold in the documentation of the exhibition whereby separation of the images contained within the exhibition itself and the images produced in the exhibition (by way of documentation) became oddly hard to differentiate from each other – like a Roland Barthes’ fever dream.
Hamelin collaborated with dancer Jean-Benoît Labrecque to respond to the exhibition through movements that were equally ephemeral as the lifeforce of the objects in the coop that might unassumingly be thrown away. Labrecque’s performance was documented through still rather than moving images, again nodding to the ontological slippages of the exhibition’s boundaries.
Ultimately, Both of us were dreamers, young love in the Sun is a portal imbued with desire, longing, and anti-presence. There are memories here, but, through their shrouded opacity, we lose sense of what’s real, which memories are ours, and which are not.
Artist Biography
Marc-Olivier Hamelin is a visual artist and author based in Rouyn-Noranda (Qc). He received his MFA from the Université du Québec en Outaouais (2019) and his BFA from Concordia University (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include Musée d’art de Rouyn-Noranda (2016); L’Écart, Rouyn-Noranda (2018, 2023); and Galerie UQO, Gatineau (2018). Group exhibitions include L’Écart (2015, 2016); Galerie UQO (2017), Musée d’art de Rouyn-Noranda (2019); Centre d’exposition de Val-d’Or (2021) and Le Lieu, Québec (2023). Residencies include L’Écart (2018); Homesession (2022); AXENÉO7 (2022) and Est-Nord-Est (2023). Hamelin’s practice ranges from installation to video, photography, performance and writing, in which he weaves his voices with those of artists, authors, and peers. His current artistic research (2022 -) focuses on the legacy of the late twentieth-century AIDS crisis on his personal and artistic life and on LGBTQ2S+ communities and seeks to understand - through the history and repercussions of the AIDS crisis on queer conditions - the vision of what is said, remembered and transformed in a contradictory gesture of love and violence.