By Becca Lemire
I’m currently on a road trip with my bf and his parents, accompanying them on their art tour of Eastern North America. Long established artists, they seem to have many friends doing many cool things. This has lead us to the sleepy rural Quebec town of Shawinigan, about 2 hours north-east of Montreal, to check out Richard Purdy’s current solo exhibition entitled L’echo-l’eau (Echoes of Water). It’s a multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary large scale statement on art, water and life, among other things. It will be on display until September 26th at Espace Shawinigan. Tickets are $10 for adults and hours are 10am-6pm seven days of the week. Check out the website for more info.

Richard Purdy is a professor of Art at the Université du Québec in Trois-Rivières. A respected and highly accomplished artist, he lives with his long-time love Rejean (a math and science prof) in a beautiful and serene hottage (house/cottage) on a lake in the Quebec wild. He hosted us for dinner after we checked out his exhibit. My bf and I tested out his canoe and swam while Richard picked veggies fresh from his garden. Later he wowed us with homemade samosas, chicken curry and Purdy-original dessert concoctions which he called “better than sex”. Turns out Richard is quite the chef as well as artist, and his jokes are no worse: “What’s the difference between English and French Canadians? English Canadians step out of the shower to pee.” Modest when receiving our praise of the exhibit, and unable to get into detail about his intentions, it seems he would rather you experience it with a blank slate and pick your own meaning. The other day a woman who had seen the exhibit 3 times came to him weeping, with a poem she wrote about it. She grew up in the area and the exhibit brought back a flood of memories from her childhood.

L’echo-l’eau spreads into 3 rooms. The first is like The Matrix meets art gallery: red walls lined floor to ceiling with Richard’s paintings hung upside down, with a few inches of still water on the floor underneath them. When people are standing still, the reflection appears to show all the paintings right-side up. The walls close in on each other at the end of the room to form a doorway to the next exhibit. Logs soaking in water line the next room, which smells like a forest but looks more like a logging factory, with simulated “rain” at the end, for which red umbrellas are provided. On to the third room, where blacklights and thousands of shredded neon toys in water create the look of phosphorescent algae, but at the same time you feel like you could be walking on Mars, observing Aurora Borealis or at a rave on LSD. Different coloured fishing lines hung from one end of the room to the other appear to be lazer shows, but it’s all just sensory sneakiness.

BONUS! If you’re in this neck of the woods on a weekend, stay for the Shawinigan Sunday Flea Market behind the Wal-Mart at Rue Trudel and Blvd Royal. Delicious local blueberries, fresh cheese curds, tons of vintage and collectible items (now raided of it’s top one percent), weed paraphernalia, biker gear, hardware and mechanic supplies, old and new fabric any hip seamstress would go googly-eyed for, sewing and craft stuff, electronics, skateboards, maple syrup (of course) and Chinese herbs and medicine among other things.
Over and out, from room 242 at Auberge le Gouverneur, Shawinigan, QC.