Video still, courtesy of the artist.
Interprètes/Performers: Nicolas Cantin, Caroline Dubois, Anne Thériault, Sarah Wendt. Musique/Music: Marie Davidson.
The artist wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts.
The Wrong Corpse is a possession, an interlope, a misattribution, an alibi, a middleman, a solecism, a diversion, an iconoclast. This exhibition brings together three artists who cast a critical, yet equally celebratory, light over the coming apart of identity under psychological, social, and political designs. Often performing a cultural intercession over the visual arts, design coerces culture into being defined by systematic refashionings of utilility and novelty. Yet this imposition also results in the construction of an intermediary space where artists may propound a critical inquisition upon this notion of utility by abusing the cultural pressures that attempt to delimit our character in order to conjure, revive, and author new identities. The Wrong Corpse is at first inanimate, a misplaced or redirected identity, yet never innocuous. It highlights the inadequacy of the identities so often assigned to us and reminds us of all that can be done upon the surface of things.
Julie Favreau’s work takes as its base material discarded examples of domestic ornamentation. Culled from thrift stores, flea markets, and vacated estates they are distributed throughout a fragmented set of parlours. A bewitched set of narratives and temporalities are composed between the performers and the objects to a feverish climax, which roams about the tableaux.
Decoration of another sort concerns Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf and his collection of trophies. Their formulaic engraved plaques present the name of their recipient and the reason for this distinction. The collection acts as an inventory of names, of affiliations, and singular achievements. Serving as a poetic device it maybe read as a chorus or simply as a list, and in either case as a testament of that “extra mile” once surpassed to gain a brief moment of repute.
Playing with the trope of an audio tour, a device common to both museums and tourist programs, L’ACTIVITÉ/Olivier Choinière leads the visitor out of the gallery and into a projected cultural utopia. Atop the daily motions and infrastructure of the gallery’s surrounding neighbourhood the audio track reveals a perpetual spectacle already underway. The work confronts the city’s present ambitions to establish itself as a cultural capital through a new urban plan. The audio tour submerges the visitor in the theatre of statecraft and asks to what point would they serve as a subject within it.
– Robin Simpson
Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.
Curator: Robin Simpson, in collaboration with Maryse Larivière
Exhibition produced by the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
THE ARTISTS
Olivier Choinière
A graduate in playwriting, Olivier Choinière has taken part in more than thirty theatre productions, mainly as a writer, director and designer. In 2000, he founded the company L’Activité Répétitive Grandement Grandement Libératrice. In 2003, L’ACTIVITÉ descended from its rooftop locale and took to the streets to present Beauté intérieure, a self-guided walk for one spectator at a time. A further project, Ascension, led its solitary strollers to the top of Mount Royal. Another itinerary with headphones, Bienvenue à – (une ville dont vous êtes le touriste), was presented in Chicoutimi, Shawinigan, Montreal and Ottawa, and will soon be staged in Mulhouse, France, in collaboration with La Filtature. Vers solitaire (OUT) directed its “spect-actors” on a walk through Montreal’s underground retail network, while Marche sur ma tombe had them wander amid the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec’s permanent collection.
L’ACTIVITÉ is a platform for creation—at once forum and mouthpiece for playwright and theatre director Olivier Choinière. Founded in 2000, L’ACTIVITÉ grew out of questioning multiple aspects of representation, especially the spectator’s place within the spectacle. With each production, the company seeks to overturn theatre conventions by introducing forms that are traditionally foreign to it.
THE WORK
Travaux d’aménagement, 2009.
Self-guided audio tour.
Voice: Simone Chevalot
Following the example of the Quartier des spectacles and other upcoming projects this year, urban renewal proposals aim to highlight a street, a location, a neighbourhood in order to organize, focus on, and encourage interaction.
L’ACTIVITIE uses existing and planned urban spaces in the vicinity of Concordia University in order to situate the listener in a social encounter framework. A statue, a sculpture, a mural are focal points that underline urban emptiness and at which art mobilizes and highlights the cost of isolation, anxiety and anonymity. The anticipation that someone will arrive or something will happen at one of these locations is consequently experienced as danger.
EXPLORE
- the types of questions this work raises about the urban environment with which it engages;
- the role of the viewer/the listener/the participant in this work.
Born in 1980, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf lives and works in Montreal. He divides his time between contemporary art, literature, performance, and electro-acoustic music. His work (solo and as part of the collective Les QQistes) has been shown in such venues as Galerie Joyce Yahouda, Manif d’art 3 – la Biennale de Québec, Centre d’art Amherst (Le luxe du vernissage) as well as Orange 2006 – L’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe and Centre d’art Clark (Les petites annonces – Objets poétiques et design vernaculaire). He has had two collections of poetry published by Le Quartanier: Fashionably Tales: une épopée des plus brillants exploits and Téléthons de la Grande Surface (inventaire catégorique).
As an artist and writer I am interested in the various objects of popular culture and in the texts inscribed on them. I collect found objects, then organize them and establish dialogues among them; I also lend their utilitarian texts literary, poetic weight. For some time now, I have been gathering small billboard notices, trophies and books, solely for their material value or their covers, along with a variety of objects that document our time.
THE WORK
Collection de trophées, 2009.
Installation, dimensions variable.
Collection de trophées is a set of 160 trophies that tell the story of how this type of object has been produced over the past 50 years. As monuments to memory in the form of curios or statuary, made by an artisan (as opposed to an artist), each trophy in the collection conveys a story. Sometimes by their wear and tear, but mainly via the texts they contain, they leave marks that allow the viewer to construct a multiplicity of fictions that will be unique in each case
EXPLORE
- the objects that are presented in this work, their accompanying texts, and the relationship that exists between the two;
- the notion of fiction and its presence (or absence) in this work.
Julie Favreau’s artistic journey began in 2005, when she presented a video installation at the Galerie de l’Université du Québec à Montréal as part of the exhibition Glissements. Art et écriture. The following year, she furthered her study of stage directing in France with internships at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. She also took part in group shows in a variety of art centres, primarily in France and in Montreal. In the spring of 2007, she created 8 personnages engagés pour peupler scénario de drame psychologique and presented it at Galerie Clark. The following autumn, her project Plan d’aménagement, a collaboration with Caroline Dubois, was shown at DARE-DARE. In 2009, she will unveil the different stages of Pièce Possession, starting at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery as part of the exhibition The Wrong Corpse and concluding at L’Écart. AXENÉO7 will host a residency-exhibition by the artist in 2010. Favreau lives and works in Montreal.
Conveying a spirit that is by turns tragic and playful, Julie Favreau choreographs actions and designs video imagery as well as installations, manufacturing miniature worlds in the manner of systems that proceed according to their own rules. Into those worlds, she introduces performers, staging an array of extreme behaviours. The resulting contexts reveal situations that hark back to the origins of tragedy, borrowing from the visual codes of conflicts, power struggles, violence and nostalgia.
THE WORK
Pièce Possession (Les chambres baroques), 2009.
With Pièce Possession (Les chambres baroques), the artist continues her investigations into the staging of performers with an installation that questions our relationship to representations of tragedy and psychology. Constructed from items gathered to evoke a mystical world, this installation-video-performance piece features trance-bound characters wandering in settings that evoke suspense and horror films.
EXPLORE
- the various elements present in Pièce Possession (Les chambres baroques) and the ways in which they interact with each other;
- the notion of absence and its importance in this work.