Maquette for After Babel, 1993

Private Collection, Calgary

According to the city of Montreal’s Public Art website, a collaboration between John McEwen and Marlene Hinton-Moore, this artwork is the maquette for “After Babel, A Civic Square,” installed in Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles in 1993 following a competition by invitation. The artwork acted as a gift from the city of Toronto for Montreal’s 350th anniversary. “The intention of ‘After Babel, A Civic Square’ is to go beyond the limitations of verbal communication. Speech is necessarily useless in communication between people and animals; it must give way to the gestures and other modes of expression...In McEwen’s view, the sculptural grouping ‘creates a form of freedom between languages by emphasizing vocabularies of silence that allow communication without words.’ ”