May 28 – July 2 (WED–FRI 11AM–6PM, SAT 11AM–2PM)
Opening reception, Friday May 28th at 5:30PM (reserve your spot here, free admission)
Le Labo, Studio 277, 401 Richmond W, Toronto
Get ready for a week of site-specific creation, chance encounters, and urban experimentation! As part of the end of the La Jachère cycle and the beginning of the Micro, artist Jean-Pierre Mot takes over the Labo with an exhibition that lies somewhere between installation and research: found objects, literary references, and images drawn from our consumer society.
Working primarily in situ, Mot develops a practice attentive to the environments he encounters. He observes, collects, and assembles. Food packaging, kraft paper bags, printed slogans: these everyday materials, far from being anecdotal, condense the logics of production, consumption, and the dissemination of our collective imagination. Mot plays with them.
Based on research conducted in 2025 and 2026 at the Cité Internationale de la Langue Française (France) and the Swatch Art Peace Hotel (Shanghai), the exhibition creates a dialogue between seemingly disparate worlds, such as Japanese animation and the works of Alexandre Dumas. These juxtapositions reveal shared narratives of heroes seeking recognition, while simultaneously highlighting their distortions across time and context. At the heart of the installation, a kinetic sculpture introduces a minimal yet insistent temporality. Two images alternate, like a rudimentary GIF. The repetitive, unresolved movement presents a form of identity in suspension. Then, in parallel, a screen presenting The Yabi.Deh Project extends this reflection into a digital environment. Using keywords related to artistic mediums such as painting, sculpture, and photography, collected from various websites, the project maps their presence according to cities, countries, and regions. It reveals trends: some mediums are more visible in certain places, others less present, or even absent. More than a tool, it is a critical apparatus that questions the very conditions of recognition for artistic practices: where, how, and for whom does art become legible, legitimate, or marginal?
Exhibition from May 28 to July 2 (Wed–Fri 11am–6pm and Sat 11am–2pm)
Jean-Pierre Mot
« My object of research centers on reclaiming the orientalist gaze depicted by colonial ethnographers. Within my art process, conceptual by nature, I use serendipity and chance encounters as a method of creation resulting in mixed-media installations of diverse assemblages giving way to satire and subversive semantics underlined by words, characters and iconographies found on discarded packagings, objects of consumption, architectural detail and everyday gesture through site-specific endeavors – while using commercial branding, food and technology in an oneiric manner to mistranslate informations. I am interested in ideas of consumption, mass production and mass media portrayals through the study of labor, colonial imaginary, body politics and remnants of the anthropocene. »
