The main piece in Jean-Pierre Gauthier’s show, Uncertainty Markers and Commotion Machines, functions almost like a series of portraits that you can immerse yourself in.

"It’s a story of these three janitors; a fiction I invented," explains the Montreal-based Gauthier, a rising star in the Canadian arts community and winner of the Sobey Art Award, Canada's pre-eminent prize for young Canadian artists, in 2004.

Gauthier transformed one of the large upper spaces in the Alberta Gallery of Art into a massive installation that revolves around a small janitorial room constructed within the space. Inside the closet-like area, which captures the cramped caretaker zones most outside the cleaning and maintenance business never see, there are three metal lockers, each housing a personality Gauthier is illustrating. Elements of the installation connected to each locker/personality are arranged in and around the nexus of the janitor closet. Sound is everywhere, with the sonic accents of each character’s particular psychological hell grinding into the viewer’s skull and heightening the emotional impact of the piece.

"It is all breakdowns, all of people I knew," continues Gauthier quietly, in his accented English. "Psychosis, suicide, burnout." He gestures to each locker in turn. "This first one, he is passionate about stars, the star numbers, when stars become black holes." The locker has a detailed, factual star map elaborately painted in the inside and several books on the nature and fate of the universe are grouped within, while a funnel has both a janitorial function and refers to cosmological theories of travel possibilities within space-time. "We have this term... I don’t know if you have it in English the same way: ‘effondrement.’ It means ‘to fall’ and also is what happens when a black hole is forming and there is a collapse."

Gauthier points out small details, loving touches, spiked throughout the space. "There are clues everywhere, little hints people may discover about the characters."

"The second personage is dead–a manic-depressive experience," Gauthier states. The locker is closed, but there are signs of former or perhaps a continuation of occupancy–tape with initials, a hint of something inside, a séance-like sequence of random whines and thumps that are eerie and fascinating. Gauthier instructs reading the labels of the cleaning products on opposing sides of the locker to garner more insight into the sadly vanished janitor. The haunting continues on a more grand scale outside the caretaker’s closet, where the vast majority of the gallery room hosts a Fantasia-like ballet of cleaning and maintenance-associated objects–brooms, sanders, garbage bags and cans, and all sorts of other things–locked in a weird, beautiful, complex dance of near uselessness. Gauthier chuckles, "Each one, they become restless machinery. But they are having fun also, trying to make fun out of their job."

The third locker has a Freudian grotesqueness, with stacked, soaked toilet paper rolls and replicas of toilet plungers made out of soap. Three pieces that are playing with detergents, water, pressure, and gravity sputter and bubble ominously through the closet, perverting the idea of cleanliness into something gross and dark. "This one is a work experience burnout," Gauthier says. "It turns to a compulsive experience." A book, Travailler sans laisser de peaux (Working Without Leaving Your Skin), graces the top shelf of this character’s locker.

"Losing someone you like affects you," the artist reflects on his strange brand of portraiture. "These losses have driven my work since the 1990s. For a long time I didn’t want to talk directly about these persons, but I passed through the sorrow of these things, and it gave strength in my work. It keeps me sane. I can express and go through these anxieties through the work. We call that resilience, I think."