Alex PouliotFO REVER, installation view, Atelier Circulaire, Montréal, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

Biting the Night

Relaxed muscles, closed eyelids, suppressed olfactory tract: during sleep, the body’s interactions with the world are noticeably reduced. Brain activity, on the other hand, is far from diminished. Alone with itself, the mind absorbs the information received and the emotions experienced while awake. Although the unconscious mind is continually active, its expression is at its most spectacular in dreams, in which things that are impossible in the real world can occur and we nevertheless feel actual emotions.

Many parallels exist between dreams and art, particularly in their modus operandi and reception. Probing dreams through art or vice versa can create a kind of mirror in which they are mutually revealed. This is the exercise carried out by multidisciplinary Québécois artist Alex Pouliot, who, in his practice, examines “the processes of representing and archiving all that can be sensed through a narrative of the self”¹ 1 - Alex Pouliot, artist’s website, accessible online (our translation). In his project FO REVER (ongoing since 2021), Pouliot grasps the ambivalence that we may feel toward what plays out within us at night. He stresses the tense relationship between the self and others, as well as the self and the world, by materializing various overlapping dichotomies: night/day, dream/reality, interior/exterior, mind/body, as well as trivial/profound, funny/agonizing, and product/residue. Through this reflection, he examines the relationship between art and life and explores what constitutes an art practice for him.