Tootsie Roll Tuesday

It was our last day in Canada, Montreal to be exact.  Quite a different scene from that of Old Quebec City with its fortified wall and pristine streets.  I am sitting on the steps of the Notre Dame Basilica doing some people watching, chatting with my dad, thinking about the upcoming day of airline travel...when my eye catches what looks to be a curly pug tail...is that some pug rolls I see, yes!  and some stubby little legs?! "Wait a minute dad, I think that is a pug statue over thereeeee......:)"  To my PUGlight it most certainly was!  An English Pug staring longingly at a French Poodle and each were being held by their owners.  The pug has a British master and the poodle, yep...a French lady! Both humans/statues are finely dressed and coiffed and also wearing what looks like fancy masquerade ball masks!  This must have been a sign that I would soon be returning to my hood and my Tootsie Roll...just in time to PUG blog and post this Tootsie Roll Tuesday!

"The inspiration for this work comes from the Commedia dell’arte and Two Solitudes from novelist Hugh MacLennan; these two snobs set up an ironically touching scene of the cultural distance between English and French Canadians.

A dashing looking English man, holding his pug, gives a superior stare at Notre-Dame Basilica, symbol of the religious influence on French Canadians. Feets away to the northern corner of the building, a woman in Chanel style suit, poodle against her, shoots an offended look to the Bank of Montreal’s head office, built in 1845-1847 and symbol of English power. With their masters oblivious to each other, the two dogs on the alert already sniffed out the opportunity to unite."

The Artist

"Marc Andre J. Fortier is born in Montréal, Québec. Faced with chaos, over-consumption and uncertainty within modern society, he questions the actors that we are with irony and occasional sarcasm. For him, all the elements of our world, be they living or inanimate, are animated by the same life and are confronted in an apparently irrational order: faces are human and robotic at the same time while objects are as much inanimate as they are animated. The art of MAJ Fortier takes place in the realm of reality and the mundane by affirming the durability and permanency of human attitudes: snobbery and elitism, envy and pride, boredom, untruthfulness and solitude."

https://artpublicmontreal.ca/en/artiste/fortier-maj/

http://www.majfortier.com/