St. Laurent's ideas in recent have evolved from creating temporary monuments, although like Locator, to interacting and changing permanent monuments. For an upcoming work that continues his Camouflage Series in Helsinki, Finland. St. Laurent will adorn a specially designed costume enabling himself to seamlessly integrate into the famous Sibelius Monument (1967). This public monument honours composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). St. Laurent's integration into the Sibelius Monument is bound to stir up controversy since the work has been debated since its construction; whether it should incorporate realistic or abstract features. The debate was heightened when an addition was considered and a realistic element was added to the original commissioned civic and abstract oriented sculpture. This addition caused more debate too over which portrait should be used to represent the composer: should a young image or "the familiar image [of the] elderly man, the national icon"3 be selected? By integrating into the work, St. Laurent will attempt to bring the monument back into the local attention, thereby, questioning civic histories. The object of this event is to simultaneously bring the monument and its related form/representational concepts back into contemporary discourse. The controversy this time will be heightened and delivered by performance art and, thereby, will help to further legitimise this action. St. Laurent 's insertion into such a well known statue will bring an awareness to his performance while asking non-art communities to question what is being seen and experienced and what does this all mean. St Laurent's performance can in advance be considered since it will enable larger discourse in the local communities where such performances and histories are not often considered.

The questioning of the performance action and the discourse created in the local community is what St. Laurent is interested in truly seeking and generating. In my email interview with St. Laurent, he talked about Andreas Huyssen's "warning that monuments can freeze memory," and Norman Kleebatt's call "for more performative, or active, monuments."4 Huyssen has written several books on modernism and post-modernism and, while Kleebatt is a fine arts curator. St. Laurent is responding to Kleebatt's call and interest in public art with his Camouflage Series. Again, St. Laurent's action questions the use of monuments by conveying an altered history of a given event to the viewer in a new context. This insertion of St. Laurent into a work is problematic and is meant to be read as flawed. The conveyed histories are constructed histories which are disseminated to the public through local government institutions by the commission and placement of public art and monuments. This history represented by government is only one point of view, while "there are always two sides to the coin." St. Laurent explores "the fact that [his] own history [may] never be reflected officially," by integrating himself into memorial monuments.5 This in turn questions what is memorialized and why. Monuments become outmoded but they are rarely removed; for example the Famous Five, on Parliament Hill (depicting Nellie McClung with other suffragists) is considered insulting to the local Canadian black community. McClung in fact lobbied to prevent blacks from voting although she and the suffragists denotes a historic moment in Canadian history but it also frames a racist and sexist past. St. Laurent's interactions with monuments questions their value to the society today and in the past by questioning their location and relevance. Should monuments such as the Famous Five that document a moment in history be kept for viewing when they also represent racism and sexism in early Canadian government?

In our interview St. Laurent seemed to be, "concerned about the politics of exclusion."6 St. Laurent states, "history is like an iceberg, with most details submerged or forgotten because of the politics at that time." In his Camouflage Series, viewers are to question the reasons for the monument, why it's is there and what memories are inspired by it or ignored. St. Laurent's interests extend further to why does the public demand and create monuments to document shared social history when certain people in the work are included and others excluded? Likewise, St. Laurent wonders what does it take to be included in a public monument. For the artist, he is attempting to integrate himself into the exclusionary realm of the public monument without the social history or provenance for his own inclusion. By physically forcing himself to become part of the monument through the adoption of props and clothing, the viewer is left to question our collective social history through the artist's actions.

Footnotes:
3 Hiltunen, Eila. "The Sibelius Monument." Eila Hiltunen. 2002. <http://www.eilahiltunen.net/monument.html> (1 April 2005).
4 Email interview conducted with Jason St. Laurent from March 14, 2005 to April 9, 2005
5 Ibid
6 Ibid