The Quebec artist Michel Goulet was born in 1944 in Asbestos and studied at the Université de Sherbrooke and the Université du Québec à Montréal. He has pursued a dual career as an internationally renowned artist and an educator, teaching first at the University of Ottawa and later at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is recognized on the international art scene for his sculptures and permanent public art works, but also for his set designs for theatre and opera.
He has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and has represented Canada at the Venice Biennale (1988). The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal mounted a retrospective of his work in 2004.
Michel Goulet has received a number of honours, including the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas, the highest distinction awarded to visual artists by the Quebec government (1990), and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2008). He was made an Officer of the Ordre national du Québec in 2018.
Artwork description
Le carrousel de l’île is formed of 12 sculptures made of galvanized steel and brass portraying human behaviours around two themes: “island” and “archipelago.”
In this project, as in his other projects presented in Montréal, Goulet transposes into the public space objects drawn from everyday life. Viewers may recognize, among other things, chairs, a Morris column, a cover of the Beatles album Abbey Road, and a ladder. The context imposes a fleeting contact, in rotation around the work; the “12 scenes” are experienced as a “sequence shot” repeated each time one passes in a car.
The installation thus transforms the island in the centre of the traffic circle into an “elsewhere” that encourages introspection. By merging nature and culture, sculpture and landscaping, it creates a fiction, that of Goulet’s “island,” in the midst of the asphalt.
“This artwork marks the passage from the turbulence of life
to a haven of peace, and vice versa.”
– Michel Goulet, 2004