The exhibition Time in All Its Forms is the culmination of an educational project that ran throughout the school year and involved more than 500 elementary schoolchildren on the island of Montréal.
First, a visit to the Musée helped get the students’ creative process going. Their observation of twenty or so works from the Collection featured in the exhibition For time is the longest distance between two places gave them an opportunity to delve deeply into the theme of time in contemporary art. They discovered, for example, that for some artists, time forms the subject of the work, while for others, it is a key component in creating the work. Next, they asked themselves: what time are the artists talking about? The past, cyclical time, linear time?
Following their visit, the students, working under the guidance of their art teachers, embarked on an exploration that produced the results we see here. The variety of symbols chosen—watch gearwheel, hourglass, dial, clock, tree, time capsule—as well as the range of disciplines—sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, video—attest to the wealth of responses they offered to this very simple question: how do you represent time?
Fourteen schools from three school boards participated in the project Time in All Its Forms. Organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, this is one of the artistic and cultural projects under the program A Montréal School for All (Ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement supérieur).
