![](/web/20061029120358im_/http://www.civilization.ca/cultur/cespays/images/pay2_13p6.jpg)
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a QuickTime VR movie of the exhibition
(Photo: Harry Foster © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)
When, like these artists, we are exposed to several cultures, we end by
having a view of things that is charged with multiple references. We thus
create a "hybrid" cultural imaginary, a "hybrid" symbolic world, nourished
by memories and present experience, that tends to become more and more
mixed. The present is traversed by images of the places that we cherish,
by the odours, the ambience or the colours of those territories that, like
childhood, we have left behind. The present/here is often perceived,
interpreted and experienced through the prism of the past/there.
And so the artists will make winter dance and the geometry of North American
urban landscapes undulate, or they will people Northern cities with the
colourful crowd of Arabic souks, or will attempt to capture their memories
and their dreams on canvas, for our greater pleasure.
In expressing attachment to the countries they lived in and places of
childhood, while at the same time paying tribute to the adoptive homelands,
the artists are creating spaces where they can rediscover themselves, or
project themselves, simply "to feel good."
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