Pictures for the Sky: Parallel Flight

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This slim catalogue with illustrations in both color and black and white
was published on the occasion of the exhibition “Parallel Flight,”
organized by Louis Déry as a Quebec complement to the exhibition
“Pictures for the Sky.” The two exhibitions showed at the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts in the summer of 1993.

Director Pierre Théberge, impressed by the latter exhibit, asked
Déry, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, to contact Quebec
artists who might be interested in the playful idea of joining art to
sky. “Pictures for the Sky” comprised the work of more than 100
internationally known artists inspired by kites and their symbolism.

Accordingly, 10 Quebec artists were asked to contribute works
suggestive of wind and birds, suspension and tension, lightness and
heaviness. It is the work of these Quebeckers, exhibited as “Parallel
Flight,” that is shown here.

Déry’s text is competent and clear. This is an imaginative
exhibition on a theme both old and new.