– I’D RATHER SOMETHING AMBIGUOUS. MAIS PRÉCIS À LA FOIS.

Jason Simon, Vera, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts

An exhibition project by Sophie Bélair Clément and Marie Claire Forté with Chantal Akerman, Simon Guibord, Philippe Hamelin, K8 Hardy, Raphaël Huppé-Alvarez, Alanna Kraaijeveld, Catherine Lalonde, Isabelle Pauwels, Jason Simon, Robin Simpson, Elisabeth Subrin, Michèle Thériault, and an anonymous contribution

Realised as part of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Program in Support of Artistic Production

Prompted by an invitation from Michèle Thériault, Sophie Bélair Clément and Marie Claire Forté question the impulse to move within the local context of the exhibition and beyond. Together, they work on the idea of being called upon, as well as the shifts and rifts in subjectivity produced by performance imperatives. They consider visibility and its limitations within an exhibition project that engages a constellation of voices, works and events through the contribution of guests.

This project offers responses that would manifest differently were they to be presented elsewhere, were they to have a different address or context. Embracing a process of dialogue between a reduced community of peers and friends, the works are articulated through lived experience. The task of giving an account of oneself calls for unending reframing and updating.

BIBLIOGRAPHy

Al-Kassim, Dina. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant. University of California Press, 2010.

Akerman, Chantal. Ma mère rit. Mercure de France, 2013.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself, Fordham University Press, 2005.

———. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. Columbia University Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith and Catherine Malabou. “You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape, and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology Of Spirit.” A Companion to Hegel, edited by Michael Baur and Stephen Houlgate, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 611-640.

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press, 2004.

Davey, Moyra. Burn the Diaries. Dancing Foxes Press, 2014.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004

Felman, Shoshana. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford University Press, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1: An Introduction, Vintage, 1990.

Lacan, Jacques. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Norton, 1978.

Laplanche, Jean and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Norton, 1973.

Moten, Fred. “the gramsci monument.” Social Text 118 32.1 (Spring 2014) <http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/32/1_118/117.full.pdf>.

Muñoz, José Esteban. “From surface to depth, between psychoanalysis and affect.” Women & Performance. 19.2 (2009): 123-129.

Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2015.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Perrault, Pierre. La bête lumineuse. Nouvelle optique, 1982.

Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. Routledge, 1996.

Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject.” University Press, 2001.

One way to approach this exhibition is by way of the presence and idea of screens and projections. Starting with a simple formal survey of the works that make up the exhibition, one could list:

A screen, folded against the wall. A leather partition. A pair of flat screen televisions. A trio of posters. A night at the cinema. A video projection. A book on display. A table set with water, wine and tea.

This inventory doesn’t immediately articulate the backstory behind the works, the possible conversations, relations and collaborations between the artists, and nor how they came to be assembled as an exhibition. It offers little in way of content of each work. But by lingering on a loose formal affiliation between the works, we can begin to build a basic vocabulary for the exhibition. To describe the works again with a few more details:

An articulated screen made of mesh panels at different heights. A screen as a room or office divider made of stretched leather. A video guided by a disjunctive narrative. A video monologue. Posters with a colour bar pattern overlaid with text. Facing the screen in the cinema. Watching a video projection in the gallery. Studying a book’s layout page by page. A night of reading at the table.

In terms of privacy—be it through concealment, withdrawal or division—screens can be either concrete or psychological, or both. Screens can be formal objects or a type of behavior that come between things or welcome attention. It is always a question of mediation with screens alternately exposing, supporting, betraying, interrupting or hiding content and subject positions:

A screen as an opaque or semi-opaque structure that hides or blocks access to something. A screen placed between things or people. A screen as a surface or body that broadcasts or receives images. Screening as a way to test something, a trial run. Screening as a means of surveying, sorting or excluding. Building up a screen through monologue. Sustaining a screen in silence.

Assembling a vocabulary exclusively around screens might eventually block or restrict means of accessing the exhibition. So with screens comes projection. Just as “screen” can operate as a noun and verb, so “projection” can slip between the two, if somewhat awkwardly. Think about the relationships between screens and projection as points of reception and broadcast, as acts of screening and projecting, or imagine the screen and the project as objects and processes. From here some questions about the exhibition that might emerge are:

What are the different ways we project? How do we project outward into the world? How do we project ourselves into or upon something or someone else? Who or what bears or openly receives our projections? How do we project, that is, how do we work on a project? And with whom do we project? How is psychological projection entangled in these projects? What do our projects and projections support and make visible? What is being screened? What is being divided, covered up, interrupted, or secluded away? How do we screen in order to become private, opaque, closed off, deflective or self-reflexive? How do we screen to become receptive, reflective and public? How are screening and projection mutual and at what points are they uneven? What is an act of self-possession? What is an act of dispossession?

To think about how we screen and project also opens up the question of being a medium—be it through embodiment or voice—and what emerges in the gaps between acts and words:

Marie-Claire Forté and Alanna Kraaijeveld’s technical study of their corresponding history and training as dancers. Sophie Bélair Clément’s relaying of a psychoanalytic dialogue alongside the transmission of a final testimony and divestment of personal possessions. Isabelle Pauwels’s polyvocal narrative entangling part-time actress Slash Dominatrix’s business exchanges, pronouncements by the ventriloquized city of New Westminster, and readings of the screenplay’s formal elements. Jason Simon quietly listening to Vera as she thinks aloud about her drive toward compulsive shopping. Simon Guibord’s layout design for a bilingual book of separate French and English texts by Clément and Forté. Chantal Akerman Skyping with her mother in Brussels. K8 Hardy documenting everything she’s worn over eleven years. Catherine Lalonde reading everything she’s written.

Is it any surprise to repeat: I project. Composed in advance of the exhibition, this text is informed by an array of sources—actual works, proposals, related texts—which when brought together do not approximate the exhibition itself. The text presented here is one possible screen through or against which an exhibition I’ve yet to see might be viewed.

– Robin Simpson, Public Programs and Education Coordinator

ARTISTS AND WORKS

- I’d rather something ambiguous. Mais précis à la fois., 2016

2016-11-16-ellen_ambiguous-06 Booklet in progress
Edited by Marie Claire Forté in collaboration with Sophie Bélair Clément
English, français

Contributions by K8 Hardy and Elisabeth Subrin, Isabelle Pauwels, Robin Simpson, Michèle Thériault and an anonymous contribution. Additional contributors could be addded.

Design by Simon Guibord

Simon Guibord is an independent graphic designer who works mostly within the cultural field and specializes in publishing and brand identity. He embraces a rational and meticulous approach, based on research and experimentation.

Putting together a constellation of voices unveils and replays some of the dialogues in the exhibition project – the works themselves, the reflections around them, and the exchanges that fuelled their production. Criss-crossed monologues and partially obliterated conversations accumulate over the course of the exhibition.

EXPLORE

The act of displaying a work in progress
How the designer’s presence is revealed in this mode of display

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Portfolio <http://www.simong.ca/>

Chantal Akerman

One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past quarter century, the film-school dropout Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) took a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion. Influenced by the structural cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, at age twenty (work by artists like Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Andy Warhol), Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, playing with long takes and formal repetition in her films, which include the architectural meditation Hotel Monterey (1972), the obsessive portrait of estrangement Je tu il elle (1975), the autobiographical New York elegy News from Home (1976), and the austere antiromance Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978). Her greatest achievement to date, however, is her epic 1975 experiment Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a hypnotic study of a middle-aged widow’s stifling routine widely considered one of the great feminist films.

No Home Movie, 2015
Video, colour, sound
Format 16:9, 112 min.
French with English subtitles

Direction, script, image, sound: Chantal Akerman
Editing: Claire Atherton
Assistance to editing: Clémence Carré
Sound mixing: Eric Lesachet
Calibration: Peter Bernaers
Postproduction: Julien Melebeck
Produced by Patrick Quinet, Serge Zeitoun & Chantal Akerman

Courtesy of Doc & Film international © Chantal Akerman

Screening with introduction by Krista Geneviève Lynes
Monday, November 28, 9 pm
Cinémathèque québécoise
335, De Maisonneuve Blvd East

This film is above all else about my late mother. About this woman who came to Belgium in 1938, fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the abuses. This woman we only see in her apartment in Brussels. It’s a film about the changing world that my mother does not see.

EXPLORE

The dialogue between mother and daughter. Observe how Akerman frames her conversations with her mother and how she documents her mother’s life in her home.
The exterior shots of arid landscape and the interior views of Akerman’s mother’s apartment. The play of presence and absence in these spaces.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Davies, Jon. “Every Home a Heartache: Chantal Akerman.” C Magazine 130. 2016. Web. <http://cmagazine.com/issues/130/every-home-a-heartache-chantal-akerman>

Lynes, Krista Geneviève. “Chantal Akerman’s films call for a different mode of viewing.” Concordia News. October 8 2015. Web. <http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/stories/2015/10/08/chantal-akerman-obituary-krista-lynes-ridm-fnc-memoriam.html>

Sophie Bélair Clément

Sophie Bélair Clément’s exhibition projects develop dialogically – through collaborations and invitations – between disciplines and media. I find that this type of exercise, whereby we are supposed to sum ourselves up in a brief and promotional way, particularly difficult. This leads me to think about the limits of self-determination and about ethical questions in liminal discourses. Bélair Clément is a doctoral candidate in literary and intermedial studies at the Université de Montréal and an assistant professor in the visual arts at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. Her projects include 2 rooms equal size, 1 empty, with secretary (Artexte, 2012) and Qu’est-ce qui vous fait croire que je puisse m’occuper de cet espace ? (Galerie des arts visuels de l’Université Laval, 2014) with Raphaël Huppé Alvarez, Vincent Bonin, Francine Delorme, Marie Claire Forté, Philippe Hamelin, Sébastien Pluot, Eduardo Ralickas, and David Tomas. – I’d rather something ambiguous. Mais précis à la fois falls within the scope of these ongoing dialogues.

– Elle a un magnifique bureau avec un dessus en cuir, mais elle doit constamment y appliquer de la lotion, 2016
3-channel video installation, colour, sound,
Wood, leather and pegboard
37 min 23 sec.; 26 min. 27 sec.; 43 min. 17 sec., French

Camera: Pavel Pavlov
Outboard motor operator: Bernard Clément
Screens: Raphaël Huppé-Alvarez
Special thanks to Philippe Hamelin, Vincent Leduc, and Karina Pawlikowski

Courtesy of the artist

This piece made up of fragments of dialogues between a woman undergoing psychoanalysis and her analyst, combined with a series of criss-crossing dialogues between a man on the brink of death – who is bequeathing his stash of Ensure, sugar, margarine, and chocolate – and his sisters. It is a tracking shot on the banks of the Petit Lac des Cèdres, the site of the family reunion, which is located 289 kilometres from the analyst’s couch. It is a triangulation of screens on which is projected a fractured scenario that reveals the distance between the sharing of language and its usage, as well as the interval between speaking and listening, in the passage from oral to written form, against the soundtrack of an outboard motor.

EXPLORE

Compare Bélair Clément’s use of screens to that of Forté and Kraaijeveld’s
The acts of listening and speaking. What language transmits, what it covers up and where it breaks down.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Sophie Bélair Clément: 2 rooms equal size, 1 empty, with secretary,⁽¹⁾. Exhibition at Artexte, Montreal, September 27, 2012 – January 26, 2013.<http://artexte.ca/sophie-belair-clement2-rooms-equal-size-1-empty-with-secretary1/lang/en/>

Marie Claire Forté: Continuous Show. Performance in the context of the exhibition Sophie Bélair Clément: 2 rooms equal size, 1 empty, with secretary,⁽¹⁾ at Artexte, Montreal, September 27, 2012 – January 26, 2013. <http://artexte.ca/marie-claire-forte-spectacle-continuel/lang/en/>

Qu’est-ce qui vous fait croire que je puisse m’occuper de cet endroit ? Exhibition at Galerie des arts visuels, Université Laval, 16 October – 16 November , 2014.<https://www.art.ulaval.ca/galerie-archives/quest-ce-fait-croire-puisse-moccuper-endroit.html>

Barbara Clausen. “Staging the Institution and the Politics of the Performative / La mise en scène de l’institution et des politiques de l’art performance.” esse arts + opinions. 81 (2014): 22-31<https://www.erudit.org/culture/esse045/esse01363/71644ac.pdf>

Thériault, Michèle. “David Tomas, Sophie Bélair Clément.” esse arts + opinions. 81 (2014): 32-3

Après, David Tomas, Sophie Belair Clément, David Jacques, Université du Québec à Montréal, April 6 2011<https://vimeo.com/28596534>

Marie Claire Forté and Alanna Kraaijeveld

Marie Claire aime penser qu’on peut toujours élargir notre champ perceptuel; inclure plus, comprendre plus, jouir plus… Choreographer and dancer, she leads projects and has recently been working with Sophie Bélair Clément, Alanna Kraaijeveld, PME-ART, Louise Bédard, Martin Bélanger and Projet bk, amongst others. Elle a dansé quatre saisons pour le défunt Groupe Lab de danse (Ottawa) où elle s’entraînait auprès de Peter Boneham. Alongside and through her artistic practice, she translates, writes and teaches dance. Marie Claire has been supported and inspired by people and institutions, namely k.g. Guttman, Lynda Gaudreau, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Michèle Thériault, Catherine Lalonde, Ame Henderson, Public Recordings, Katya Montaignac, Et Marianne et Simon, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Toronto Dance Theatre, Noémie Solomon, Jody Hegel, Adam Kinner, Tangente, Circuit-Est, Studio 303, the Casino Luxembourg, Artexte, WP Zimmer and the RQD. Elle sera interprète en résidence à l’Agora de la danse de 2017 à 2019.

Dancer, teacher and improviser, Alanna Kraaijeveld is interested in playfulness, endurance, timing and rigour. This season, she is working with Louise Bédard Danse, Dave St-Pierre, Justine A. Chambers and Marie Claire Forté. Her quixotic movement style, humour and adaptability have supported her in diverse projects, from Susanna Hood to Opéra de Québec. Alanna’s practice is greatly influenced by her time as a member of the now defunct Le Groupe Dance Lab under the direction of Peter Boneham. Her study of movement and teaching is ongoing. She trains with Linda Kapetanea and Jozef Frucek, co-developers of Fighting Monkey movement research and runs a training group where she explores less traditional training forms.

Collections de danses de Christian Rizzo, Gene Kelly et Stanley Donen, Édouard Lock, William Forsythe, Merce Cunningham, Saburo Teshigawara, Trisha Brown; Jeffrey Daniel, Michael Jackson et Vincent Patterson, Mats Ek, Dana Michel; Dana Foglia, Chris Grant et JaQuel Knight, Crystal Pite, Pina Bausch, Lloyd Newson, Tedd Robinson, Hofesh Shechter, Bob Fosse, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Daniel Linehan, Amanda Acorn, Jiři Kilyán, Akram Khan, Stijn Celis, Deborah Hay, Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Meg Stuart et Philipp Gehmacher, Marie Claire Forté, Trajal Harrell, k.g. Guttman, Benoît Lachambre, Jerome Robbins, Louise Lecavalier, Solange et d’autres, 2016

Marie Claire Forté in collaboration with Alanna Kraaijeveld, and with the assistance of Sophie Bélair Clément, Hugues Dugas, Claudia Fancello, Yves Forté, Nadège Grebmeier Forget, k.g. Guttman, Kelly Keenan and Michèle Thériault

Schedule of performances:

Tuesday, November 15, 5 pm – Saturday, November 19, 4 pm – Saturday, November 26, 4 pm – Tuesday, November 29, 5 pm – Saturday, December 3, 5 pm – Saturday, December 10, 4 pm – Tuesday, December 13, 5 pm – Thursday, December 15, 5 pm

My friend and long-time collaborator Alanna Kraaijeveld and I looked for recordings of dances we enjoy, learned them, and repurposed them for our dancing pleasure. The material – a series of choreographic excerpts unceremoniously strung together – requires that we use our extensive dance training, so rarely called upon in this way throughout our respective careers. We celebrate technique without focusing on virtuosity. We happily offer the energy of dance in the gallery – although as Alanna says, we can’t give it all away. A set of screens obstructs and deconstructs our bodies as mid-career dancers, as women no longer young. The collection reveals the labour of dancing and remembering, the random specificity of movement vocabulary, repetition, process and friendship. We will perform the work eight times over the course of the exhibition and our repertoire will continue to grow throughout as we learn and add new excerpts.

EXPLORE

Consider how embodiment is engaged as a means to explore a shared education and history. Observe the role of the screen as a device to interrupt a clear view of dancers.
Forté and Kraaijeveld’s research for their on-going collection principally drew from online sources. Consider the vernacular life of this documentation as it is routed through the dancers’ “unceremonious” assembly of dances.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Philippe Hamelin

Philippe Hamelin explores the connection between special effects and affect. Using spatial or video montage, he seeks to create poetic dispositions between humans and technological media, calling into question the relations we develop with and through technology. His work has been shown in art galleries and in numerous festivals in Canada and abroad. After studying in cinema at the Université de Montréal, he completed a master’s degree in fine arts at Concordia University. He lives in Montreal and teaches at UQO and the Outaouais CEGEP.

Follow Spot (Moving Head II), 2016
Rotating spotlight
Lighting score created for the space of the exhibition

K8 Hardy

K8 Hardy (b.1977, Fort Worth, Texas) is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. Her performances, photographs, self-distributed zines, videos (including music videos for Le Tigre, Lesbians on Ecstasy and Men) and films have been exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art/Whitney Biennial 2012; MoMA PS1, NY; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas; The Tate Modern, London; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NYC; Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien in Graz, Austria. Her recent solo show “Docudrama” was the inaugural exhibition at Lagagareena Gallery in Los Angeles.

K8 Hardy studied at Smith College, the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, and the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Outfitumentary is her first feature film. The film had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in Feb. 2016, with subsequent screenings at Doc Fortnight at MoMA, NY; at Outfest in L.A., at Era New Horizons in Wroclaw, Poland and at the ICA, London.

Outfitumentary, 2016
Video, colour, sound
82 min., English

Direction, photography and editing: K8 Hardy
Co-Production: Madeleine Molyneaux
Sound Design: Lynne Trepanier
Online Edition/Colourist: Drew Bolton
Produced by Hardy Studio, USA

Projected in the Gallery on Saturday, November 19 at 5:30 pm and Tuesday, December 13 at 6:30 pm

In 2001, I set out on the structuralist journey that became my first feature film, Outfitumentary. I named the project at the outset, and considered it a document for posterity, an important record of the dress codes of a radical lesbian underground. The formal rules I imposed were simple: to roll my video camera and capture a shot of myself from head to toe with a turn to provide front and back. Ultimately, I played fast and loose with my own rules, but stayed true to my original intentions.

The film serves to express a fundamental principle that runs through my work and practice—the ways in which the body becomes its own medium. First and foremost, the film is a formal and structural exercise. It is less about narcissism—the narcissism that one might assume given that I am on camera for every frame of the film—than it is about identity, and the way in which both the materiality of the body and its subsequent “outfitting” —in private and public life—serves to refine, define and probe the very nature of the body politic.

As I was consistently shooting this project, my artistic practice tangentially grew to include live performance, often linked to a video signal. Perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps not—I stopped shooting Outfitumentary in early 2012, when my camera finally broke. It was at the same period that I was included in the Whitney Biennial.

In the last few years, I returned to the footage I shot, and began crafting the project into a feature length film. I describe Outfitumentary as a gesamtkunstwerk.

Video as a democratic medium…

My formative years as an artist were spent making video art and experimental Super-8 films. I was interested in the art of cinema, and also in my own performance. I was interested in video as a democratic medium and in its ability to circulate so easily on tapes. I dove into shooting and hand-processing super-8, splicing my films by hand, and also working with 16mm.

I discovered video art through punk rock and riot Grrrl, and through artists and bands that were making videos in that scene. Video was the easiest way for me to make my own statement, to represent myself as a young angry woman, and to get the work out there. I had previously been making small zines and mailing them all over the states. I had a drive to tell my own story. This was a step beyond.

Video was also a way for me to express my queer identity and articulate my thoughts of gender as performance. I was connecting the sexual politics with the experiential. And I was connecting an experimental process with queer politics.

– K8 Hardy, New York, December 2015

EXPLORE

The politics of fashion and self-fashioning.
The daily act of keeping a record and inventory, how multiple histories can be registered and tracked through what we chose to wear and how we identify, make public and communicate membership with these compositions.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Hardy, K8. Interviewed by Ariana Reines. Bomb, 119, Spring 2012. Web. <http://bombmagazine.org/article/6429/k8-hardy>

Marcus, Sara. “Durational Fashion.” Texte zur Kunst, 102, June 2016. Web. <https://www.textezurkunst.de/102/durational-fashion/>

Raphaël Huppé-Alvarez

My grandfather Paul was one of those agricultural workers who did everything according to the rules. He was a butcher, farmer, woodworker, carpenter. He passed on his love of wood to me. Later, my father taught me how to build houses. I developed a taste for architecture and cabinet making. One day, I became fascinated by the precision with which Jean-Pierre Bourgault sharpened his knives. Since I was one of his students, lent me fifteen professional chisels. It is from that moment that I understood that I would work with wood in the future. It has now been fifteen years that I make a living as a cabinetmaker. And very soon, I plan on getting my own professional chisels.

See the entry on Sophie Bélair Clément for more information on the work

EXPLORE

How Alvarez locates his practice within his family history and how this interfaces with Bélair Clément’s use of conversation in a family setting and the psychoanalytic exchange.
The use of leather and the overall form of the screens.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Documentation of previous collaboration with Sophie Bélair Clément <http://www.bebelle.design/sophiebc/>

Catherine Lalonde

Catherine Lalonde trained in theatre and dance. As a performer, she is currently working with the choreographer Jean-Sébastien Lourdais. As a poet, she was awarded the Prix Émile-Nelligan in 2008 for her third volume, Corps étranger (Québec Amérique / La Passe du vent). She is also a culture reporter and dance critic for the daily Le Devoir.

Relire, relier : une lecture sèche
Tuesday, 6 December, 6pm – 10pm

The poet and performer Catherine Lalonde will undertake a marathon dry read of all her published texts. With no bodily effects or dramaturgy, she will read in quick succession Jeux de brume (1991), Cassandre (2005), Corps étranger (2008), and her manuscript in progress, La Dévoration des fées (working title), in chronological order of publication date. It will take the time that it takes. There might be some interruptions for a bit of chatting, a break. There might be some stammering. On the table, sources of inspiration and notes; some wine, tea, and water. The spectators are invited to come and go as they please, to read through the booklets, or to engage in the endurance test of listening to the entire reading, which will continue, from the first page of the first book to the back cover of the – as yet unpublished – fourth. This reading is presented in the context of I’d rather something ambiguous. Mais précis à la fois.

EXPLORE

What happens when poetry is delivered in a systematic fashion. Consider the redistribution of rhythm around the table and throughout the evening: the coming and goings, the passage of time, drinking of wine, water and tea, the conversation in among guests.
How this extended reading of poetry might open up the time or serve as a support system for encounter and sociality.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Lafleur, Annie. “Lecture sous pilgrim influence.” Spirale. December 9, 2016. Web. <http://www.magazine-spirale.com/article-dune-publication/lecture-sous-pilgrim-influence>

Lalonde, Catherine. Corps étranger. Québec Amérique, 2008 (English trans. Foreign Body. Guernica, 2011.)

Lalonde, Catherine. Cassandre. Québec Amérique, 2005.

Lalonde, Catherine. Jeux de brume : vertiges. Québec Amérique, 1991

Writing for Le Devoir <http://www.ledevoir.com/auteur/catherine-lalonde>

Isabelle Pauwels

Isabelle Pauwels is based in New Westminster, BC. Working primarily in video installation, her blend of performance and documentary realism explores the fraught relationship between narrative conventions and everyday social interaction.

Whatever You’re Feeling, 2016
In Case The Americans, 2016
Long Clean Semis, 2016
Digital collages, digital colour prints on paper

Courtesy of the artist

,000,, 2016
High definition video, colour, sound
58 min. 30 sec., English

Courtesy of the artist

,000, is a single-channel video about false fronts, paint jobs, happy endings, commerce, rot, and customer service. Or, more simply put: pictures, popcorn, and kernels of truth. Originally, this work was a multimedia performance commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in Troy NY, in 2014. The audience was onstage with 27 channels of pre-recorded audio, 9 channels of video, sculpture, and choreographed lighting. Quite the extravaganza. In 2016, I flattened the work. I took out the sensory pleasure of multi-channel audio immersion, and left you with… the vicissitudes of narrative. And the pleasures of Paul Kajander’s score.

I could say the narrative explores the psychological impact of commercial relations (are there any other?) between people. But I don’t like explanations, especially my own. Maybe the story is just tease and denial. Tease: you can’t be the same at the end as you were at the beginning. Because that’s the rule. Though I can’t say I’ve ever transformed myself. Maybe I lack faith? Sometimes I think ,000, is about the failure of narrative to deliver us from life. Or about how incredible communication is, and how you shouldn’t trust it. Like that time in preschool when I looked in awe upon the mouths of two girls making the sounds of English – stunning view. If you don’t like the words, stay for the music.

EXPLORE

The different types of dialogue and texts, in what ways do they correspond and intersect, where do they interrupt or speak over each other. What are their sources: A character’s lines? The setting or action as described in the screenplay? Vernacular conversation? Advertisement copy? Official statements? Unidentifiable?
Capital’s role in the narrative. In what way are the protagonists and their dialogue affected, guided and positioned by capitalism? Do they talk back or muddle their words?

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Audio play

Pakasaar, Helga and Jonah Gray, eds. Isabelle Pauwels. Presentation House Gallery, 2013.

Ritter, Kathleen. Review: Isabelle Pauwels: B and E, Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, January 31 – March 22, 2009. esse arts + opinions 66, spring 2009. Web. <http://esse.ca/en/compte-rendu/66/presentation-house>

Or Gallery – Or Channel. Post-Studio Visit Podcast (Episode 8): Isabelle Pauwels. Web. <http://channel.orgallery.org/post/147258548535/post-studio-visit-podcast-episode-8-isabelle>

Jason Simon

Jason Simon is an artist who lives and works in New York and teaches at The College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Request Lines are Open, at Callicoon Fine Arts, NY and In and Around the Ohio Pen, Sismografo, Porto Portugal, both in 2015, and at Artexte, Montreal, 2014. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao; Mumok, Vienna; Dazibao, Montreal; Yale Union, Portland, and Ibid, London. Simon’s videos are distributed by The Video Data Bank and Icarus Films, his writing has appeared in Arforum, Parkett Frieze, Springerin and Afterimage. Simon and Moyra Davey’s Ten Years of the One Minute Film Festival was hosted by Mass MoCA in 2013. Simon was a founding member of the cooperatively run gallery Orchard (2005 to 2008) and he established the Art & Tech filmmaking residency facility at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The summer 2016 Bomb Magazine features a conversation between Simon and Claire Pentecost.

Vera, 2003
Video, colour and sound
24 min. 42 sec., English

Courtesy of the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts

The protagonist of Jason Simon’s riveting documentary is an attractive and vibrant young woman grappling with the transition between a history of daunting debt, due to her habit of pathologically collecting high-end clothes and accessories (what she regards as the ‘artistry of acquisition’), and her new, restrained behavior that reflects her desire to control spending and get control of her life (“Now it’s a matter of one-day escapades as opposed to a way of life.”).

At the outset of Vera, Simon poses questions off-screen, gently guiding the course of Vera Saverino’s rapid-fire monologue of frequently unfinished sentences. Nevertheless, Simon’s off-screen questions go silent after the first few minutes. The filmmaker does not present any pictorial spectacle of Vera’s material accumulation, but instead focuses on her abundant verbiage—an impressive stream of self-observation that is as remarkably good-natured as it is critically reflective. In Simon’s treatment, Vera’s obsessive-compulsive excess takes verbal form, metaphorically standing in for the tens of thousands of dollars she narrates having shelled out in order to satisfy her acquisitive hunger. Vera’s affection for and struggle against overindulgent shopping expresses an overarching ambivalence that appears to be shared by Simon, who, as director, exercises a light touch that is seemingly without judgment. Simon’s mode here essentially allows Vera to speak for herself; he simply facilitates her self-portraiture.

The head and shoulders shots of Vera take place in an generic space that could be the living room of her parent’s house, where due to financial necessity she continues to live, or, for that matter, the wood paneled office of a psychiatrist. The set up of Vera is reminiscent of a free-form therapy session caught on tape, with the titular subject and protagonist incessantly psychoanalyzing herself. Desire fluctuates as Vera articulates her internal struggle, excitedly announcing that she still wants to be able to get what she wants, only without succumbing to financial ruin.

– Julie Ault

EXPLORE

The various modes of self-presentation discussed and reflected upon. Vera interrupting herself to observe how her monologue might resemble a therapy session. Her appreciation of high fashion and understanding of the demands of consumer culture and how they mutually inform her compulsive shopping.
Simon’s presence but relative silence during Vera’s self-analysis.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Chris, Cynthia. Review: Jason Simon, Vera, Orchard, New York. 21.4.2006 – 14.5.2006. Springerin 3 (2006). Web. <http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1824&lang=en>