Celebrating Quebecois art and kitsch along Highway 20

An audacious art project is giving motorists in Quebec a better reason to pull over to a rest stop than a full bladder or an empty stomach: an appetite for art.

Throughout the summer, over a dozen sites along Highway 20 between Montreal and Quebec City are being taken over by contemporary artists. It's called Truck Stop, and it's one of Canada's most unique public art projects.

Truck Stop goes back to the roots of what rest stops and truck stops have always been: public spaces. The project encapsulates several different types of art, ranging from visual art — photography, sculpture, film — to performance art.

Co-curated by Centre Clark in Montreal and l'Oeil de Poisson in Quebec City, the project challenges road-weary viewers' perceptions of what public art can be.

"It's something really innovative," says artist Mathilde Forest. "Personally, for me, Highway 20 is somewhere sad, grey… I hope Truck Stop will make it bring some colour and some fantasy."

A mix of nostalgia and new art

Forest is one half of the art duo Gagnon-Forest, which has taken over the rest stop near Saint-Nazaire d'Acton, about 30 kilometres east of Drummondville.

Before the End pays homage to the eccentric inventor Jean Saint-Germain's short-lived spaceship-shaped restaurant, complete with robot waiters. L'Extra-Terrasse operated briefly in the early 1990s.

"Many people in the area of Drummondville have seen this in the past, remember it, but many others never heard about it," says Mathieu Gagnon.

The artists wanted to capture the site before it was completely demolished.

"Why did it disappear like this? It stopped, it closed, and was left to decay for a lot of years."

Humour is very present throughout many of the projects: Alain-Martin Richard, one of Quebec's most celebrated performance artists, will welcome people to join him on summer afternoons. It's called "Come on, let's watch the marmots go by."

Some of the propositions flirt with the political. Douglas Scholes will be walking from Montreal to Quebec City as close to Highway 20 as possible without being on the highway over the course of Quebec's construction week. It makes reference to how unfriendly highways are to anything — or anyone — that isn't a motorized vehicle.

Gisele Amantea's project Verse by the side of the road uses the visuals of highway signs and language to challenge ideas of territory and ownership.

She employs an early highway advertising technique which originated in the 1920s, using sequential signs.

"They were very popular because in early highway driving, there was nothing on the road, cars went very slow, it was an early form of entertainment, sort of."

Rethinking territory, space and land

While researching the physical site for her Truck Stop installation, Amantea's travels took her to the Odanak reserve near Pierreville, which is about 45 kilometres southwest of Trois-Rivières. That's where she visited the Musée des Abénakis for the first time.

This led to her decision to present her work in French, English and Abénaki as a visual confrontation of sorts.

The Abénaki language is on the verge of extinction — there are only 20 speakers left.

"The space between Quebec and Montreal was once all Abénaki territory, so I really wanted to have one of my verses translated into Abénaki and to have it in public as a way of kind of claiming that this was once the territory of these Indigenous people."

For the most part, artists are inviting drivers to slow down, metaphorically and literally.

"I think there's a tendency to go as fast as you can between Quebec and Montreal and not think about all that's in between, so for me it's trying to activate kind of thinking about that space," says Amantea.

Performances and events take place in various locations along Highway 20 throughout the summer, until the artists pack up on Aug. 19.

The final event will be a screening at the abandoned drive-in near Saint-Germain-de-Gratham, close to Drummondville.