Party Wall

Collective Exhibition, Espace Transmission, Montreal, Canada, September 27th – October 1st 2023

Julie Roch-Cuerrier’s works explore the links between the idea of the party wall and that of corespiration. The artist salvaged tires from the former garage that once occupied Espace Transmission’s building, using them as molds to create blown-glass sculptures. Evoking their external relief or the space occupied by air in their internal cavity, the glass shapes seemingly melted into the very surface of the tires. In this fluid materiality lies an attempt to represent the visible embodiment of breath, examining the forms taken by an interiority magnetized through its externality. Although the blown forms act as individual objects, they exist in a shared reality with the tire that supports them. A metaphor for the human experience, the contrast between the two evokes the otherness experienced in the social and urban context. Through these contact zones, between forms and materials, I seek to better understand how individuality is anchored within the collective. The works bear witness to the building’s history as a tire center, but also to its new vocation as an art gallery. At once the physical imprint of found artifacts and the conceptual materialization of a space’s activation in the community, the work uses the intimacy of breath to reveal the architectonics of a place.