This exhibition explores the long life of late modernism in the field of architecture by bringing together a series of works created over the last decade by Shannon Bool, Kapwani Kiwanga, Rachel Rose, and Jonathan Schouela, a new film installation by David Hartt, as well as works by Lynne Cohen and François Dallegret produced in the 1960s and 1970s.
Skyscrapers by the Roots
Reflections on Late Modernism
While the earlier artworks offer a contrasting yet representative view of some important tendencies at the time, the more recent productions make use of historical hindsight to renew the critical discourse on late modernism. To this end, they employ various methodologies such as archival research, site-specific interventions, a revival of traditional techniques or (neo)modernist strategies, speculative fiction, and autoethnography.
François Dallegret, Un-house. Transportable standard-of-living package / The Environment-Bubble, 1965. India ink on acetate.
Photo: Courtesy the artist © François Dallegret / CARCC Ottawa 2025
Skyscrapers by the Roots examines certain phenomena that emerged from the principles of functionalism and technological innovation underpinning the modernist project: climate-controlled interiors, large-scale modular standardization, strategies of accessibility, mobility, and transparency, integrated media flows, and the development of spaces devoted to self-design. Although initially connected to the pursuit of democratization and social progress, over time, these innovations became inseparable from an unsettling fusion of the spheres of private life, labour, consumption, and spectacle.
David Hartt, Horizon, 2025
Video installation, colour, sound, 16 min 52 s
Photo: Courtesy the artist © David Hartt
The works in the exhibition foreground the embodied experience of the built environment and ask the “ghosts” of modernism important questions about social organization: For whom were these spaces and their apparatuses designed? What modes of living did they presuppose? What processes of identification and production of desire? And what forms of coexistence? In response to these questions, the works construct a scenography, in which the ever meaningful and reinvented “remains” of modernism function as optical instruments whose projection, superimposition, and framing effects reveal surprising perspectives on the present.
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Another conceptual basis for Skyscrapers by the Roots is the Musée d’art contemporain’s current temporary premises in Place Ville Marie. Built between 1958 and 1962 by the American firm I. M. Pei & Associates, this iconic complex soon became a symbol of the modernization and renewal of Montréal’s downtown core during the Quiet Revolution. Typical of the International Style represented by other landmark skyscrapers built along Boulevard René-Lévesque during the same period, Place Ville Marie was also an innovative, multi-level project of urban redesign whose shopping promenade (the first air-conditioned indoor commercial facility of its kind in Montréal and the current location of the MAC’s exhibition spaces) became the starting point for the development of the “underground city.” This expansive network, which British architectural historian Reyner Banham famously related to the megastructure form, links a series of key urban structures that appeared at the same time, including Place Bonaventure, the metro system, and the many developments of Expo 67. The history of this sequence of events and their extensive sociocultural impact provides a contextual framework for the exhibition.
View from the opening of the Rouault exhibition presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal at Place Ville Marie, from March 19 to May 2, 1965.
Photo: Unknown to the MAC, archives of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Curiously, not long after its construction, Place Ville Marie became the MAC’s first site of activity in 1965, where it showed a travelling exhibition dedicated to French painter Georges Rouault.
Sixty years later, we would like to take the MAC’s second occupancy of Place Ville Marie as an opportunity to present a selection of works that engage specifically with the issues of late modernism and our experience of its spaces today. It is our hope that these works will resonate deeply with this significant historical context and offer a new perspective of it.
Horizon
Illustrated by British comic artist Lando, this mural is a component of Horizon, a film installation by Canadian artist David Hartt presented inside the MAC’s exhibition space. It transforms the corridor along the MAC at Place Ville Marie into a psychedelic and retrofuturist narrative that gradually shifts from the private spaces of the bedroom and living room to the public spaces of the arcade, street, and urban horizon, in an imaginary city strewn with megastructures and certain elements reminiscent of Montréal.
Hartt’s work combines documentary and conceptual aspects that refer to living in a Montréal suburb, where he grew up. Evoking his culturally mixed origins, the artist describes this context as a source of “profound feelings of alienation,” against which the modernist buildings of downtown offered an imaginative refuge. By reconsidering the physical and symbolic horizon as it might be seen by the next generation, Hartt’s work proposes “a new polyphonic heritage story” in which familial and social time underlies the longer and more open time of speculative fiction.
Horizon is a film installation created specifically for Skyscrapers by the Roots, a group exhibition presented in MAC’s exhibition spaces in Place Ville Marie that explores the heritage of late modernism in architecture.
Some resources are available to make this exhibition more accessible to persons with disabilities. They are available online as well as on-site at the Museum.
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