This Montreal artist is using bike lights to summon the UFO he encountered as a child
How do you turn your strangest memory into a reality?
Perhaps all of us have an inexplicable memory from childhood: we thought we saw a ghost, we heard a sound nobody else could hear, we had a dream that felt a little too much like reality. And maybe that one memory stays with us forever, making the hair on the back of our neck stand on end when we recount it to our friends.
For Montreal's Robert Theriault, that memory is from 1974, when as a child he encountered a UFO. And that close encounter has driven an artistic practice you could aptly describe as conceptual, experiential, and emotionally driven. Simply put, Theriault has decided to use his intricate lighting of bicycles — and the way he and his friends ride them around the city at night — to send a homing beacon out to the UFO he remembers from his childhood.
In this mesmerizing video directed by Duncan McDowall, we're told the story of Theriault, his innermost desire, and the way he's made it into art.
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