Seuils
Nathalie Bachand, Conseil des arts du Canada
Mécanismes entropiques et appareils remodelés : Michel de Broin et l’inconscient technologique
Daniel Sherer, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Les châteaux de sable
Michel de Broin, Inter, art actuel #130
Entre le possible et l’impossible
Nathalie de Blois, Musée national des beaux arts du Québec
Sculpture of Steel, City of Nerves
Bernard Schütze, Espace art actuel
Michel de Broin at Bitform Gallery
Darren Jones, Artforum
Michel de Broin
Bryne McLaughlin, Art in America
Disruption From Within
Rodney LaTourelle, Plug-In ICA
La disspiation sur le virage
Laetitia Chauvin, Esse
A Logic of Being Against?
Bernard Lamarche, Parachute
Entrevue
Michel de Broin, Etienne Zack, Mass MoCA
Michel de Broin BMO Project Room
Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art
Montreal’s Retired Metro Cars Are Staying Busy
Mark Byrnes, City Lab
Where is Michel de Broin?
Anne Schreiber, Art Net Magazine
Interview with Michel de Broin
Regine, We Make Money Not Art
Une oeuvre monumentale
Éric Clément, La Presse
Construire des chateaux… Dans le ciel de Toronto
Éric Clément, La Presse
Michel de Broin: une oeuvre publique à sauver
Éric Clément, La Presse
Castles Made of Sand
Bryne McLaughlin, BMO project Space
Le vivre ensemble
Annie Gérin, Presses de l’Université Laval
Un électron libre aux confins des genres
Jérôme Delgado, Le Devoir
Danger awakens the senses: An interview
Oli Sorenson, MKOS
Un Michel de Broin un brin solennel mais redoutable
Benedicte Ramade, Zéro deux
Bright Matter
Sarah Milroy, Canadian Art Magazine
Michel de Broin
John K Grande, Border Crossings magazine
Cities of Light
Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art Magazine
Michel de Broin: From Mad Scientist to Pied Piper
Shannon Anderson, Canadian Art
Une éternelle semence
Jérôme Delgado, Le Devoir
Michel de Broin at Mercer Union
Alex Snukal, Uncubed Magazine
Énergie réciproque
Bénédicte Ramade, MacVal
Pièces à conviction
Marie-Ève Charron, Le Devoir
Neue Heimat
Bernard Schutze, Berlinische Galerie
L‘art comme conspiration
Jean-Ernest Joos, ETC Montréal
Propulsion and entropy
Bernard Schutze, C-Magazine
Reverse Entropy
Thomas Wulfen, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien
Objeux pour Objoies: l’attrait de l’imprévisible
Stephen Wright, Semaine
Épater la Galerie
Jean-Ernest Joos, Villa Merkel
L’espace public mis à nu par l’artiste même
Jean-Philippe Uzel, Spirale
Résistance?
André-L. Paré, Etc. Magazine

Castles Made of Sand, Bryne McLaughlin

BMO project Space

castles-made-of-sand.ca

 

SCENE.
On the top floor of a downtown Toronto office tower, an elaborate contraption retro engineer by a machinator is simulating an industrial production line.

ACT I, SCENE I: The Ruin.
The large contraption sits in silence amid the inner workings of capital finance. At one end of its long conveyor belt is a sandcastle. At a glance, the castle resembles the turreted facade of the Royal Canadian Mint. But its form has slowly dried and collapsed, its pinnacles and battlements lie cracked and eroded. Outside the office window, a modern cityscape of glass and brick spreads out along the shore of Lake Ontario. The decaying castle is knit into the view.

ACT II, SCENE I: The Tide.
Mysterious forces prevail. A small panel fixed to the wall above the castle displays a sequence of digital timestamps. Each tracks gravitational forces at work: a harmonic coherence of cosmic powers that results in a tide. As the tide turns—at approximate intervals of 12 hours, 25 minutes and 14 seconds—the machine momentarily revives.

ACT II, SCENE II: The Fall.
The tide turns. Time and energy collide. Entropy is reached. The conveyor clicks into motion. The invisible hand of gravity tips the castle ruin over the edge. There is no witness to the castle’s final moment. The mechanism that determines its fleeting existence—its bankruptcy—remains beyond control.

ACT III, SCENE I: The Maw.
The sand is consumed by the . Its mouth is a black hole, a mysterious void that attracts and absorbs raw matter and nullifies time and form. Yet an end is also a beginning. An agitator mixes a precise ratio of water with the sand. Water is the fatal force and the binding element. Destruction and creation are fixed in a fine balance.

ACT IV, SCENE 1: The Spout and the Conveyor.
Sand rubble travels via a screw conveyor along the machine’s length. At its opposite end, a spout piles an measure of ten litres of aerated sand onto the conveyor belt. This is the hourglass, a sand clock that marks this Sisyphean labour, this perpetual return to the beginning.

ACT V, SCENE I: The Forge.
The framework of a press looms over the centre of the machine. The sand pile moves slowly, inescapably, toward its molded stainless-steel jaws. Pneumatic energy—another invisible force—has been stored between tides. The conveyor stops; the press closes tight with 4,000 pounds of pressure. It sets in an elemental contradiction. Sand is a composite of rock, mineral, glass, bone—a rough sedimentary history of existence. Air is ungraspable, transitory, ethereal. The simple task of shaping sand into a castle over a few seconds exhausts an immense invisible power.

ACT V, SCENE II: The Castle.
Like a wave, the conveyor carries the newly formed castle from its mold. The old has become new; tidal forces fade; the machine falls silent. The castle has returned. It is the same, yet not the same. No two sandcastles are. The elliptical turning of the spheres—celestial, social, financial—continues eternal. Our gaze moves past the castle to the cityscape beyond. The stage is reset; the inevitable collapse begins anew. The infinite and the finite locked in a play of cyclical returns that never ends.