After completing an electronic engineering degree in 1963, Florent Veilleux headed to France and lived in Paris until 1981. Upon returning to Quebec, the author, composer, stage actor and theatre director devoted himself to photography, experimental video and the creation of absurd lumino-kinetic machines: objects and junk that he collects and automates. For five months in 1997-1998, he exhibited a monumental and entirely whimsical installation at the McCord Museum. In 2000, in celebration of the new millennium, nearly all of those same machines were displayed in the store windows of Tristan & America in New York’s Rockefeller Center. Veilleux has since continued to create intricate and imaginative mechanized inventions, including Labyrinthe de l’Imaginaire (2009), a one thousand square foot cavern filled with comical machines reflected in giant funhouse mirrors.
SEE:
« Florent Veilleux : Homo ex machina » by Claude Paul Gauthier, ESPACE #44, p. 39.
« Florent Veilleux : The Y2K Buggy (Chronique newyorkaise) » by Claude Paul Gauthier, ESPACE #52, p. 49.
« L’Urbaine Urbanité IV, Géométrie sociale : Entretien avec Gilles Bissonnet » by Serge Fisette, ESPACE #80, p. 26.
