David Tomas

From February 2012 to April 2013

Two monumental works by David Tomas located on the lateral façade of the Café Cherrier, corner of Saint-Denis, as well as on the façade of the Marché Bonsecours are part of this project. These two works are part of David Tomas’ exhibition Live rightly, die, die…

Live rightly, die, die… explores the contemporary phenomenon of artistic tourism and the exotic through the presentation of a select number of visual works. However, instead of simply illustrating or documenting the recent trends that might be associated with tourism and the exotic in contemporary art, Live rightly, die, die… attempts to address the phenomena of tourism and the exotic within an eccentric frame of historical reference and in a way that exposes their spatio-temporal ambiguities, tensions and possibilities. It is through these ambiguities and tensions that the exhibition also raises the question of the possible existences of unknown places, opaque languages, singular encounters, treacherous, unstable spaces and idiosyncratic exchanges.

David Tomas is a Montreal-based artist, anthropologist and theorist whose interdisciplinary works explore the cultures and transcultures of science, technology and their imaging systems. His publications include: Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Vision Technologies (Continuum, 2004), A Blinding Flash of Light: Photography Between Disciplines and Media (Éditions Dazibao, 2004), DUCTION, co-authored with Michèle Thériault (Éditions Carapace, 2001) and Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (Westview Press, 1996). His latest publication was Escape Velocity: Alternative Instruction Prototype for Playing the Knowledge Game (Wedge Publication, 2012). He teaches at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQÀM.