Discoveries: Montreal is a 9”x9” hard cover art book featuring a series of acrylic photomontages created by international artist, Denise Buisman Pilger over a period of two years from 2011 to 2013. In this series, the artist was inspired to explore each of the unique and picturesque villages that make up the Island of Montreal.
After successfully running an Indiegogo crowd funding campaign earlier this year, the artist raised enough funds to transform the series into an art book. “The pieces of the series can be enjoyed on their own but they are most powerful as a whole, the book is the way to keep the series together,” the artist explains.
This book can be purchased on the artists website (denisebuismanpilger.com) or at Viva Vida Art Gallery, the McCord Museum Boutique, Amazon and Etsy
Denise’s work reflects her love of photography, painting and travel configured into graphic pseudo-realities of everyday life filtered through her own whimsical creative lens. Her tableaux are bustling, surreal pastiches of -architectural elements and city life, arranged at unusual angles, irregular scale and not necessarily in their true-to-life configuration.
Her creative process involves digital photo manipulation, image transfer, acrylic photomontages, acrylic paints/-mediums, and other innovative techniques. Working in a variety of scale, Denise creates panels that are graphic, contemporary and yet somehow nostalgic. Often her pieces are black and white with minimalist colour accents, while others abound with colour - her visual vocabulary always unique and always authentic.
In her most recent series – Discoveries: Montreal - Denise explores each of the island city’s 34 boroughs. Venturing out (camera in hand) she has captured the iconic and quirky details that make every borough unique, turning each into a one-of-a-kind mixed media panel. The series offers a rare insight into the distinct flavours of all the ‘little villages’ that make up the island’s rich landscape.
Merging many photographs into a singular image, Denise’s unique impressions of the city capture the urban landscape through the eyes of a new resident, highlighting the often mundane, yet essential elements that make up the living, breathing and evolving ecosystem of the city she’s called home since 2009.
