Montreal artist Jean-Pierre Aubé (left) with Giverny Capital president François Rochon.
In a ceremony this week, Montreal artist Jean-Pierre Aubé was awarded the $10,000 Giverny Capital Art Prize.
Aubé, who holds an MFA from l’Université de Québec à Montréal, is known for works that use sound waves beyond the range of human hearing to capture and transmit impressions of nature and urban living.
Since 2000, for instance, he has tried to capture the sounds of the northern lights through very low frequency receivers. For his 2005 work Élégance – General Electric, he installed microphones in a household refrigerator, amplifying its 60-hertz hum by a thousand times. And at the 2010 Quebec Triennial, he showed 31 soleils (Dawn Chorus), an immersive installation which synthesized 31 instances of the sun rising in video and low-frequency sound formats.
Of late, Aubé has been working on Electrosmog, an ultra large band radio receiver system that monitors 480,000 radio frequencies to create a picture of electromagnetic activity today.
The Giverny Capital Art Prize is awarded to an exceptional Quebec artist every two years. This year, the prize jury was made up of Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal curator Stéphane Aquin, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal assistant curator François LeTourneux, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec curator Bernard Lamarche, Vox director Marie-Josée Jean, and Galerie de l’UQAM director Louise Déry.
