How do you let out your raw emotions? This artist has made a room that screams

Inside Montreal's Fonderie Darling, the exhibition space seems to be alive. Six air compressors of various shapes and sizes decorate the concrete floor, and nearby, six metal plates descend from the ceiling. Organ pipes of different heights are stacked upright on the plates, evoking a city landscape. Bright orange tubes travel from the compressors and meet the base of each pipe. 

I've walked in as the motor of a large, blue compressor whirrs, its staccato sound reverberating in the tall, industrial room. It continues and continues for what seems like a long time, and it starts to feel like the sound is rattling my bones. Then, all at once, the harsh noise dramatically changes, as all the air collected in the tank is released through the maze of tubes and out of the metal organ pipes, which sing a beautiful and haunting chorus of rich and vibrant sounds.

This is part of Montreal-based artist Maggy Hamel-Metsos's exhibition Simile Aria, currently on view at the former metal factory turned gallery. A graduate of Concordia University's studio arts program, Hamel-Metsos has quickly secured a notable spot in the Canadian art scene for her ambitious installations that explore a wide range of concepts and materials. Perception, time, memory and family are themes that recur throughout her artwork. These motifs are often added to or re-envisioned based on the medium she's employed. It's common to go into one of her exhibitions and encounter something entirely different than the last. That's because central to Hamel-Metsos's practice is a radical form of experimentation and artistic risk-taking that needs to be experienced in order to be appreciated.

For Simile Aria, the artist uses a combination of sculpture, installation and photography to contemplate breath, time and the cultural mediation of emotion. "We live an insane amount of emotions on the daily, but out of respect or strategy, sometimes they will take a different mass or form," Hamel-Metsos explains to me from her studio at Fonderie Darling, which has awarded the artist its prestigious three-year residency. "But it's like, where does emotion go? Sometimes I want to scream. Where do I get to do that?"

Hamel-Metsos doesn't answer the question, but offers a metaphorical response instead. She references two screams that are deemed acceptable: one from babies, who "get a free pass," she says, the other from opera singers, who have "mastered the skill of turning raw emotion into a song." Her installation hones in on the latter. 

While the air compressors act as lungs, the organ pipes are the throat through which air gets shaped, creating a sound that is halfway between a heavenly choir and a pained screech. Here, intense emotion isn't completely hidden behind something beautiful. If testimony is a declaration of truth, and if truth is sometimes challenging to communicate, Hamel-Metsos shows how art can deliver that testimony for both the artist and the viewer. Our deepest feelings find expression through this work's resonant sound.

Her exploration of time and process is also present in a second piece that completes the exhibition. Magnifying glasses, photographic prints and matchsticks, two of each, are held in place on a pair of tripods. Not far from these, an elegantly shaped mirror is perched roughly 10 feet in the air on a metal stand. On cloudless days, the sun beams through the ceiling's windows and strikes the mirror. The sunlight then reflects into the magnifying glasses, which will eventually light the matches and incinerate the two images — one of a crying baby, the other of an opera singer mid-aria. Their remnants will turn to ash on the gallery floor. 

When I visit the show, the images are still intact. If you're lucky, you'll get to see the work spark to life — something that will transpire over the course of seconds. Most viewers, however, will only see the photographs in either their before or after state. One way to approach this piece is to think of the sunlight as time, burning the present to ash and scattering its memory on the floor of the mind. Another, Hamel-Metsos says, is to think of the sun as emotions that "live so intensely in us that we feel like we'll be consumed by them."

Talking to the artist, I notice her enthusiasm for ideas as well as the diversity of thought that goes into her work. While I consider Hamel-Metsos's to be a conceptual practice, her work doesn't neatly fall under the label of conceptual art, a tradition that prioritizes ideas over material. In truth, her art seems to evade labels altogether. 

"She's definitely not an artist that's easy to classify," says Fonderie Darling curator Renaud Gadoury. "She's rigorously conceptual, but she's also a romantic artist. Those are two things that don't normally get put together." 

Eli Kerr, the founder of the eponymous Montreal gallery that represents Hamel-Metsos, says something similar. "I think that she's definitely working in lineages of conceptual art, but the work is unapologetically material. And she's very interested in that materiality." 

Alongside a reverence for ideas, Hamel-Metsos is an artist with a deep appreciation for the physical — that which can be touched, built upon and created. "They say how we only perceive a fraction, but I'm not really interested in that," she says. "There's an infinity in everything you're looking at. We have access to so much."

It's that love for all that can be perceived that keeps Hamel-Metsos's concept-driven art from being esoteric. All of her ideas and curiosities get streamlined into art that is profoundly lucid, offering her viewers not only understanding but an invitation to partake in the work. 

"I think that what's successful about her art is that it remains not only accessible, but also quite generative," Kerr says. "It's not closed off in the way that more conceptual art, historically speaking, would be. Other people can bring their experiences to these works." 

In Simile Aria, Hamel-Metsos effectively combines the conceptual, material and personal in an installation that is rich with meaning, artisanship and ingenuity. The boundary between spectator and art is suspended as the viewer is invited to join in. Not only do you see it, hear it and contemplate it, but you feel it — both emotionally and in your bones.

Simile Aria by Maggy Hamel-Metsos is on view at Fonderie Darling in Montreal through May 18.