John Latour Thursday’s Child
Montreal-based artist John Latour’s multidisciplinary practice—spanning text-based art, sculpture, and found photography—examines the ways in which we connect with the past. His work explores how memory, history, and personal narratives are mediated through language, objects, and images. In recent years, Latour has turned his attention to themes of spirit communication and physical mediumship, using them as metaphors for our attempts to reach across time. His practice suggests that the past is not a fixed entity but a shifting, elusive presence—one that we continually interpret, reshape, and even conjure.
Thursday’s Child presents a new body of photo-based works that engage with the past as a mercurial and unstable concept. Using found photographs including 19th-century tintypes and early 20th-century snapshots of individuals, families, and friends, Latour overlays flecks of white paint, disrupting and altering the figures within the images. Through this intervention, his subjects become spectral, existing in a state of both presence and absence. They emerge and recede, as if caught between memory and erasure, invoking the fragile nature of history and personal remembrance.
The exhibition’s title references Monday’s Child, a 19th-century nursery rhyme that assigns character traits based on the day of one’s birth. The verse for Thursday’s child—"Thursday’s child has far to go"—suggests a journey, a sense of moving forward while remaining tethered to the past. In Latour’s work, this idea takes on a poignant significance: the figures in his altered photographs, though anonymous, still hold an emotional and historical weight, inviting us to consider their untold stories and unfinished journeys.
In addition to these reworked photographs, Latour presents album pages containing a single photographic image, surrounded by vast, empty space. These voids allude to missing family members, forgotten narratives, and the gaps left by time’s passage. The absence within these compositions heightens our awareness of what is unseen and unknown. As viewers, we are drawn into an act of speculative remembrance, piecing together fragments of information—the fleeting expression of a smiling child holding a garden hose, or the formal poses of an anonymous group—attempting to decipher their relationships, histories, and identities.
Through these subtle yet profound interventions, Latour does not seek to provide answers but instead highlights the instability of memory and the inherent subjectivity of historical narratives. Thursday’s Child invites us to engage with these echoes of the past, not as fixed relics but as shifting presences simultaneously here and elsewhere, seen and unseen, remembered and forgotten.
Thursday’s Child is presented in the project space at United Contemporary, an intimate, hidden room at the rear of the gallery. This setting enhances the immersive quality of the installation, drawing viewers into quiet contemplation. The small tintypes and found photographs act as portals to the past, inviting a deeper engagement across time. Through these delicate objects, Latour encourages a sense of connection, prompting viewers to reflect on memory, absence, and the traces left behind by those who came before us.
John Latour is a Montreal-based visual artist who works in a range of media including sculpture and installation, found photography, page art, and artists’ books. Latour holds a BFA in Studio Arts, an MLIS, and an MA in Art History. He is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (as a member of the research group Elastic Spaces). Latour has had solo exhibitions in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and London (UK) and he has participated in group exhibitions across Canada and abroad. His work is found in the Hallmark Fine Art Collection (Kansas City), the Fine Art Collection of the City of Ottawa, and the Tom Thomson Art Gallery (Owen Sound), in addition to numerous private collections.
