PORTRAIT OF ROYAL VIC

Exhibition features different visions of the original site of the Royal Victoria Hospital by 11 well-known Montreal artists who spent hours exploring the empty complex

This operating theatre in the Women’s Pavilion of the former Royal Victoria Hospital featured seats for medical students and residents to observe surgeons — their professors — at work. The image by Gabor Szilasi is part of a photography exhibition at the MUHC that captures the empty shell of the original site used from 1925 to 2015.

The MUHC Glen Site is at 1001 Décarie Blvd. The vernissage is Thursday from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in the art gallery space at the Research Institute on Level S1 in Block E. Entr’Acte will continue until March 2018; after that the photographs will be hung throughout the MUHC. What does a hospital look like once it no longer has its patients, its equipment, its furniture — and its vocation?

Depends on whom you ask. Eleven well-known Montreal photographers were invited by the RBC Art and Heritage Centre of the McGill University Health Centre to tour the original site of the Royal Victoria Hospital, which has been vacant since the hospital moved to the new Glen site in 2015.

Accompanied by Dr. Jonathan Meakins, director of the art and heritage centre (and former director of surgery at the Royal Victoria, the MUHC and then Oxford University) and Alexandra Kirsh, the centre’s curator, they spent hours walking through the complex looking for spaces or features they especially liked or that spoke to them in some way.

Each artist made two visits: one for orientation, the second to shoot. To avoid overlap, each was asked to submit three or four different images; an acquisition committee reviewed them all and selected one photograph from each.

The result is an engrossing series of 11 images that show different visions of the Royal Victoria. Together, they make up an exhibition opening with a vernissage on Thursday in the MUHC’s contemporary art gallery space at the Research Institute — one of six gallery spaces at its Glen site.

The public is invited to attend and to meet the artists: Raymonde April, Michel Campeau, Serge Clément, Luc Courchesne, Yan Giguère, Angela Grauerholz, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Yann Pocreau, Gabor Szilasi and Chih-Chien Wang.

This show is called Entr’Acte, a nod to the fact that “the hospital itself is between vocations,” as Kirsh said. “It is no longer a fully functioning hospital; we are not sure what it will become next.

“We were trying to capture the space itself and it is interesting to have contemporary artists do that because everybody, obviously, has a different perspective,” she said. “It makes you reconsider what you are looking at — and it is maybe not what you were expecting … a lot are close-ups, different perspectives of the space — and not all are recognizable as the Royal Victoria Hospital.”

Said centre director Meakins: “One of our missions is to create a healing environment. The art is primarily for the workers and the waiters — those who wait for this and for that, the people who need to be distracted from all the things going on around them.”

Each photograph is being printed in an edition of three; part of the contract with the artists is that each will donate one print to the MUHC, to become part of its collection.

GABOR SZILASI

RECOVERY ROOM, WOMEN’S PAVILION, ROYAL VICTORIA HOSPITAL, by Luc Courchesne. Courchesne was impressed by the look and feel of the hospital interior once the furniture was gone and the space stood unadorned. He felt he could “see the ghosts.” He was especially interested in the women’s pavilion, which “seemed very mysterious to...

ROYAL VICTORIA/THE CLOCK/L’HORLOGE, by Yann Pocreau. The hand-wound clock that graced the clock tower of the Women’s Pavilion, its face illuminated by a circle of lights, is one of only three like it in existence — the others are at the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress — and it was...

DIANE’S ESCAPE, by Marie-Jeanne Musiol. The image is named for someone whom Musiol accompanied on her journey from this life. She knew she wanted her image to reflect a personal approach. “I did not want to do something that was strictly architectural,” she said. She was looking for a space...

OPERATING THEATRE (1924), by Gabor Szilasi. This operating theatre in the Women’s Pavilion featured seats for medical students and residents to observe surgeons — their professors — at work. The room was in steady use from the building’s construction around 1925 until the Royal Victoria Hospital...