Frédéric Daty works in his studio at Le Petit Salon Des Arts.
The house on Cyr Avenue looks like any other from the outside: a big, brown, three-storey building with wide windows, just off Montreal Road in Vanier.
Inside is where you’ll note the difference. There’s no furniture on the bare wooden floors, save for a large piano in the first room on the left. There are no couches, carpets or signs of human inhabitants.
These first empty rooms appear to be completely abandoned, except for a series of photos on the walls, depicting grayscale body parts wearing vibrant, colourful fruit. A green grape necklace is wrapped around one model’s collarbone, another wears a pair of earrings made of Bing cherries.
The photos range from whimsical to provocative: On another wall, a woman clutches a slab of pineapple to her cleavage, while a bright red pepper pokes out of the waistband of a male model’s underwear.
“I thought it would be nice to have a play of objects that you wouldn’t normally see together, so it was just kind of an idea to have things just for aesthetics. Nothing specifically like a message or anything,” explained amateur Ottawa photographer Jeff Ngan.
This is Le Petit Salon Des Arts, and Ngan called the gallery a godsend for emerging artists like himself.
He originally came to the gallery’s first exhibition in November 2007 to watch a friend, musician Krista Muir, play the ukulele. But after speaking with homeowners Misun Park and Frédéric Daty, Ngan was given an opportunity to put his own work on display. Ngan’s untitled photos were shown at the gallery’s most recent exhibition, Emergence, which ran Feb. 23 to 29. Ngan, who has a full-time office job, said Emergence allowed him to showcase his artistic talent, even if profits from a couple photo sales didn’t exactly pay the rent.
“It was just really great to have a place where I can just start out, get a feel for what it’s like and talk to people about my work. That’s what this place is all about, a starting ground for emerging artists,” said Ngan.
Park and Daly, married now for seven years, decided to transform their home into an art gallery after Daty became involved in painting and metalworking. He wanted a forum to showcase his own art, but the couple soon realized they were looking for community involvement and a larger audience. So they searched for artists and musicians willing to forego profit, and by visiting other shows and talking to friends of friends, they found enough talent for their first exhibition Vernissage.
“We go so fast through the speedy way of life, eating this kind of food, having this kind of house, fitting into this kind of model and it’s not necessarily the best model for everyone,” said Park, who helps support the couple’s art habit with a full-time teaching job at Rideau High School.
So instead of living the regular life, the couple moved all their furniture to the third storey to make way for what they call an emergent art space. The gallery has hosted two week-long exhibitions so far, and Daty said both shows offered a unique experience that broke the typical Ottawa art gallery mould. Their next exhibit is set for June.
What sets the gallery apart is that the owners do not take commissions on any pieces sold, and there are no entry fees. The goal instead is to provide exposure, an audience, and a good starting point for Ottawa’s artistic talent, he said.
“We don’t propose to be another gallery in that sense, because there is already a market and they do it well, those galleries do their own thing and we totally respect that,” said Park.
Of course, taking the focus away from profit means that Le Petit Salon struggles sometimes— funding being only one of the problems. The gallery needs to be in operation for two years before it becomes eligible for government funding, so right now all expenditures come out of Park and Daty’s pockets.
The couple said they don’t keep track of how much money they’ve invested in the gallery so far. But Park and Daty said they have no complaints about costs, and that the real challenge facing the gallery is finding publicity and new artists.
“It’s hard because people just don’t know how serious you are or how good the work is until they see it, so we’ve been struggling to become legit. But it gets better each time,” said Park.
“We play with the conventional and the unconventional and we think we offer something really great and unique. We can’t wait to see what the next one is like.”