Corridart manicule
This whimsical pointing hand (or ‘manicule’) has a truly fraught history. Multiple signs like this one were part of Corridart, an outdoor exhibition designed and installed by a group of local artists along Rue Sherbrooke, in anticipation of the 1976 Montréal Olympics. In an incendiary act of vandalism, Mayor Jean Drapeau had the whole thing torn down in the middle of the night, three days before the opening of the Olympics, without even informing the artists. (For more context here’s an excerpt from Bob McKenna’s 2002 documentary À propos de l’affaire Corridart / About the Corridart Affair.) The donor of this remarkable sign had rescued it from the city dump while trying to retrieve some property belonging to the scaffolding company he worked for.
The sign has been installed in the brand new Loyola Landing student resource centre in the AD building on the Loyola campus (see above). It joins one of our neon Rapido signs and our two programmable split-flap displays from the Montréal-Mirabel International Airport passenger terminal. (These were last seen in the media installation YMX: Migration, Land and Loss After Mirabel (2017) created by local artist Cheryl Sim.)
Still images of manicules taken from À propos de l’affaire Corridart / About the Corridart Affair (2002). Main image: a manicule installed on temporary scaffolding on Rue Sherbrooke. Small image at left: manicules and artworks at the city dump.