y2o: On the Surface of Water

y2o by artist Dominique T. Skoltz has something timeless about it. Instantly pleasing to the eye, the video evokes suspended time, and viewers seem to be lifted into weightlessness between the walls of Arsenal Montréal. It is in this private foundation on William Street in Montréal that the filmy2o is being shown: nine poetic chapters at the crossroads of audiovisual installation and video music. Totaling 30 minutes, the work shows a woman, Vanessa Pilon, and a man, Jacques Poulin-Denis, in a kind of giant aquarium. By slowing down and accelerating the image, Dominique T. Skoltz draws our attention to the movement of air bubbles, the evanescent texture of the actress’s hair, the definition of the actor’s muscles and the elegance of every gesture, heightened by the density of the aquatic environment. Skoltz evokes the duality between man and woman, between seduction and rejection, between yes and no, at the very edge of the skin. Outside time and space, placed between the voids of water and air, the performers enter into a slow collision

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that proves sensual and intimate, a reflection of the crossed polarities that make^up restless love. After leaving the film’s spellbinding soundtrack, visitors move to the second room, where y2o_duality is installed. The aesthetic and approach around y2o have been developed by Skoltz in a multitude of formats, andthis tentacular work is also presented at Arsenal. Torn speaker membranes, video screens dissecting y2o, and photographs of megaphones subjected to 20 megatons of pressure each deepen the themes at the

giving visitors a poetic view of communication, relationships and even eroticism. If you are tempted by the exhibition, presented until May 7, take the opportunity to look at works by the other artists in the room. Nicolas Baier’s fascinating Eternity is a stainless-steel sculpture of the word “eternity” standing three metres high. Reflective like a mirror, it multiplies and distorts our image endlessly, plunging us into the troubled vision of a future that will always remain unknown. Israeli artist Tamara Kostianovsky has cannibalized her own clothing to reproduce realistic cuts of meat, hung on authentic butcher hooks. These works echo the post-minimalism of Danh Vo’s We The People, a life-size replica of the

Statue of Liberty made piece by piece and then dispersed across seven continents.