Plural

Beyond the Walls: Explore Plural 2025’s Installations

Blog
March 27, 2025

This year, allow yourself to be immersed in the fair's installations. These large-scale installations are the works that do not fit into the fair’s booths, by virtue of their hybrid nature or atypical size, punctuating the space and deploying themselves freely beyond the constraints of walls. These special projects question and redefine the relationship between art and space, offering the public an immersion beyond its usual formats.

Think outside the box and discover these installations, which are located on both floors of the Grand Quay:

1. Marvin Luvualu António - COOPER COLE

Condos, 2024

In Condos, these towering acrylic boxes serve as intricate vessels, encapsulating a dynamic mix of collected objects, personal belongings, and urban artifacts. Each piece acts as a visual archive, preserving fragments of the city’s evolving landscape and the intimate experiences of those who inhabit it. By assembling these diverse materials within transparent enclosures, António explores themes of memory, identity, and the ever-changing nature of urban life. The sculptures function as contemporary relics, offering a compelling reflection on the fast-paced transformation of major metropolitan centers. Through Condos, the artist invites viewers to consider how personal histories and communal narratives intertwine within the structures we build and the spaces we call home.

Find Condos on the 1st floor near the bar, across from Paul Petro Contemporary Art, booth 110.

2. Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux - The Blue Building Gallery

Horloge de miel, 2024

Horloge de miel is an apparatus that explores decelerated and embodied time, using the viscous flow of honey as its unit of measurement. Here, unlike the classic hourglass, the flow of sand is replaced by a flow of honey, thus the counting of time changes from a digital principle (grain, void, grain, void ... 1, 0, 1, 0 ...) to an analog principle (a fluid continuum without empty space). This is more faithful from a psychological point of view to the sensation that the passage of time imprints on consciousness. Horloge de miel offers an immersive experience entirely based on the integration of consciousness into the moment.

Find this installation on the 2nd floor, next to the Mobilia Lounge and the restaurant.

3. Jim Holyoak - McBride Contemporain

Reappearing Mountain, 2025

Jim Holyoak will be at the fair to create this in situ work, which will evolve throughout the weekend. Painting on a wall of the fair, he will present an ephemeral creation, a work which, by its very nature, can only be captured in the current moment.

Holyoak explores ink and graphite drawing in all its forms, from postcards and books to monumental installations. Each of his works transports the viewer into a world oscillating between the biological and the fantastic, inviting reflection on our relationship with non-human worlds. Rooted in empathy, Holyoak depicts strange creatures and their habitats, the unknown and the invisible — beings too tiny to be seen or so ancient that they have turned to stone.

Find Holyoak’s installation on the 1st floor, on a wall of McBride Contemporain’s booth, 117.

4. Aaron McIntosh - Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

Entanglements: Flowers at the Border / Keeping Safe, 2022

A fourth-generation quilter from Appalachian Tennessee, McIntosh's practice is deeply rooted in fiber. He uses this heritage as a language, a form and a tool, for it offers both a tactile trace of kinship and a political platform. In Entanglements, the artist takes up the metaphorical potential of plant life, where he finds speculative roots for constructing and exploring queer ecologies. McIntosh rejects the colonialist and heteronormative paradigms that dominate botany in their perpetual "othering" of homosexuality. Instead, he asks how we might imagine homosexuality through the sexual and gendered dynamics present in the plant world.

Find McIntosh’s work on the 2nd floor, in front of the staircase and Loto-Quebec's booth, P05.

5. Elisabeth Perrault - Pangée

Ma peau de 28 ans, 2024 et Bouquet de fleurs, 2024

Elisabeth Perrault, who creates immersive and fantastical works and installations, has been archiving her body since 2019 with her series Ma peau, which she began at the age of 23. Her first “skins” were made of fabric, sewn around her body to conform to its shape before being removed like a snake shedding its skin. With Ma peau de 28 ans, she adopts a new approach: applying clay directly onto her skin to create a rigid, fragmented imprint. Covered in silk and then assembled with embroidery, these fragments reflect the artist’s meditations on the body as a trace, a perpetual transformation, and the tension between materiality and disappearance.

Find Perrault’s installation on the 1st floor, next to the bar and accross from Pangée, booth 108.

To learn more about Plural's installations, join Fiona Nguyen for a guided tour in English, Floating Narratives: A Walk Through the Key Installations, on Friday, April 11 at 3pm or in French, Récits flottants: un parcours des installations phares, on Saturday, April 12 at 3pm!