A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce The Detours of the Possible, curated by: Julie Lohnes, Saada El-Akhrass, and Marie-Josée Parent as part of the MONTRÉAL/BROOKLYN Exchange event. This exhibit features artwork by the artists: Aimée Burg, Julie Côté, Véronique Ducharme, Bang-Geul Han, Minna Pöllänen, Kathleen Schneider, Barbara Siegel, Catherine Tremblay.

Montréal/Brooklyn is a contemporary art event built on the meeting of the two cities. Eight Brooklyn-based organizations with eight Montréal art organizations, along with a combination of forty artists, are participating in this project. Grouped into pairs, institutions from each side of the border have curated exhibits, where artworks from Montréal and Brooklyn-based artists truly engage with one another. The project was conceived as a round-trip between the two cities: beginning in Montréal in October 2012 and finishing in Brooklyn during January 2013.

In the context of this exchange, Julie Lohnes, Executive Director of A.I.R. Gallery, Saada El-Akhrass and Marie-Josée Parent of Les Territoires collaborated to create The Detours of the Possible. This exhibition invites the public to unleash its imagination onto tales assembled by eight women artists. Each artist encourages us, the viewers, to participate in a universe made-up of micro-fictions. At times playful and tactile, but also contemplative and poetic, each work takes us from a private to a communal story through the objects and characters that inhabit each exhibit. The artists allow for the creation of new realities and the realization of utopian ideals permitting us to create meaning and make new sense of our lives.

These works develop a space where visitors may appropriate the artists’ stories through participating in them. The Detours of the Possible invites the viewer to enter an imaginary world that he/she can build and deconstruct as the hero in his/her own narrative. Acting as an extension of our reality, this imaginary place helps us live more poetically in the world.

In addition, there will be a roundtable discussion, “Brooklyn/Montreal – Perspectives on the Art World,” hosted by A.I.R. Gallery, that will focus on the art institutions, cultural policies, practices and debates in both cities that have shaped and are shaping the world of day’s art.