Maryse Goudreau’s practice moves between mediums of photography, video, the archive, the performative and the participatory. The work is an inquiry into Québec’s forgotten maritime history, specifically that of the government’s campaign in the 1920s to eradicate beluga whales.
Although an untrained dancer, Adam Kinner researches the political potential of the performing body through dance. In his piece Suite canadienne, Kinner re-performs a minor part from Ludmilla Chiriaeff’s 1955 folk ballet, titled the same, in institutional spaces across the city. Aluminum Lake, a sculptural installation by AN Soubiran, references the pigment found in cosmetics, food and oral drugs in relation to how HIV is defined, experienced and represented.
I Never Think of Alaska is a photographic series by Lise Latreille. Latreille’s longterm engagement with her hometown of Shawville, Québec is central to her work. She depicts rural and familiar landscapes while disrupting linear narrative and documentary photography. Geneviève Moisan’s textile based practice is inspired by traditional artisanal techniques but created on the computerized Jacquard loom. Dark, Foursome, Selfie, Kiss, Gum, À la pointe, and Relation reflect this tension between the new and old in hypermodernity.
Shirin Fahimi’s installation, The Apparatus of Desubjectification, is a theoretic investigation of the relation between the subject and mechanisms of communication. Her research takes its artistic form in chalk diagrams and a video. Matthew Ng is interested in the tension between order and freedom. In his installation Projector paint, he juxtaposes various material forms, from light to ceramics to reflect upon the interface between an internal view and external influences, and the art historical canon.
The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
The Gallery and the artists gratefully acknowledge Hexagram and the CDA for their technical support.
Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.
Read moreProjects selected by Sarah Watson, Director of Artexte, and Michèle Thériault, Director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.
CloseArtists
My practice, as a visual thinking process, traverses the distance between theoretical research and the process of art making through diagramming. By tracing invisible forces and relationships between perception and intention, I attempt to materially display mental geography. The diagram, as a movement towards actualization, does not merely imitate something that already exists but maps out possibilities prior to the appearance of a definitive form.
THE WORK
The Apparatus of Desubjectification, 2015
Chalk on black wall, video projection
Courtesy of the artist
The Apparatus of Desubjectification investigates the ontology of the subject in relation to the mechanism of language and communication. As the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben suggests, the subject is the result of an interaction between living beings and apparatuses. On the other hand the process of desubjectification suggests a potential release from the discourse, that is, as Michel Foucault points out, a release from your own face, your own identity and your own past.
EXPLORE
- Notions of communication and how they are addressed in this work;
- The various elements that constitute this work and how they relate to each other.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
CloseI work with processes of photography, the archive, video, the performative, and the participatory. Offering a fresh perspective informed by sociology, politics, and anthropology, I constitute a thematic archive based on a Québec that turns its back on its maritime identity. Utilizing a hybrid approach, I attempt to free images from their static relationship to official history and create narrative, literary spaces where memory is a weapon.
THE WORKS
Études du béluga, Beluga Studies, 2014
Ink jet prints
Reconstitution des archives 1, Reenactment of the archives 1, 2015
Performance, backdrop, painting on paper, fake floor, eight costumes
Reconstitution des archives 2, Reenactment of the archives 2, 2015
3D video, and super 8 film
Bombardements, 2015
Ink jet prints
Courtesy of the artist, based on images from the Archives de la Côte-du-Sud
Through the use of archival materials Études du béluga / Beluga studies traces the history of the attempted eradication of beluga whales by the Québec government in the 1920s. These campaigns were launched as the government was under the false notion that these mammals subsisted on fish that were vital to the survival of the fishing industry. Found images of this specific moment in history are paired with performances that were staged by a boys’ school located in the same area as the whale ‘bombings’ (one of the tactics of eradication). Goudreau uses these images in a sustained process of connecting the social, political, economic and anthropological threads of the present.
EXPLORE
- Archival research and the role that it plays here;
- The performative and the participatory, how they engage the viewer and create meaning in this work.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
marysegoudreauarchive.blogspot.ca
CloseSince 2011 I have been making dance works as a way of researching the performing body’s radical potential to undo our modes of relation and belonging. Broadly construed as dance while moving across disciplines and contexts, the works call for a plunge into the precarious topography of nonknowledge, nonsovereignty and the ongoing labour of movement.
THE WORK
Suite canadienne, 2015
Digital video
Videography: Emily Gan
Courtesy of the artist
For two days in April I danced in the public and private institutions of the city: city hall, the courthouse, the stock market, the arts council, the investment banks, the trade buildings, and the convention centre. I danced a minor part from Ludmilla Chiriaeff’s folk ballet Suite canadienne, choreographed for CBC television in 1955. Presenting an originary work of Québec ballet danced by a largely untrained body, the performances raise questions about belonging, permission and the re-performance of cultural fantasies.
EXPLORE
- This artist’s use of dance and the performative body;
- The political implications of re-interpreting Suite canadienne.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
I work with photography and address themes of memory, geography and temporality. I explore the symbiotic relationship between environment and the existential – how each informs the other and creates identity, pathos, and nostalgia. My long-term project shot in my hometown of Shawville, Québec, explores alternate ways of experiencing and depicting time and space in documentary photography. A circular, poetic, temporal signature replaces the expected linear, narrative structure.
THE WORK
I Never Think of Alaska, 2015
Chromogenic prints
Courtesy of the artist
The artist thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its support
The photographic series I Never Think of Alaska creates tension between the banal familiarity of the rural landscape and the unknown, and mirrors feelings of ambivalence and discomfort around notions of home. The arrangement of images references a map or timeline, and attempts to access alternate modes of spatial and temporal orientation. Time is suspended – both by the camera and by the slow crawl of time in this depopulated region of Québec.
EXPLORE
- How this artist positions herself and her own subjectivity in her documentary photographs depicting her hometown of Shawville, Québec;
- The role that narrative plays in this work.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
CloseImmersing myself in the current social context and drawing inspiration from textile production of the past, my woven works using the electronic Jaquard loom are situated between traditional artisanal technique and the technological world of the digital. They question the notion of conceptual thinking via the material practice of making and the prominence it has taken on in contemporary art, and via the relationship between the private world of the home and the public and social one offered up by the city and the internet.
THE WORKS
Gum, 2014
Brocade Jacquard weaving, hand dyed mohair, mercerized cotton, cotton, and orlec, muslin, on a wood stretcher
Dark, 2014
Brocade Jacquard weaving, mohair, mercerized cotton, cotton, and orlec, muslin, on a wood stretcher
Foursome, 2014
Brocade Jacquard weaving, mohair, mercerized cotton, cotton, and orlec, muslin, on a wood stretcher
À la pointe, 2014
Brocade Jacquard weaving, mercerized cotton, cotton, muslin, on a wood stretcher
Relation, 2015
Brocade Jacquard weaving, hand dyed mohair, mercerized cotton, cotton, cotton muslin, on a wooden stretcher
Kiss, 2014
Brocade Jacquard weaving, rayon chenille, mercerized cotton, cotton, and orlec, muslin, on a wood stretcher
Selfie, 2014
Brocade Jacquard weaving, rayon chenille, mercerized cotton, cotton, and orlec, muslin, on a wood stretcher
Courtesy of the artist
Taking the updating of 19th century woven silk scenes and the approach of the new materiality as starting points, this work weaves the fine line between discomfort and anticipation, between presence and the definition of non-places. It does this by signaling the emergence of a new relationship with the other that we meet in public space, in presenting portraits of characters, of passersby, and in materializing their relationships, as incongruous and hypermodern as they may be.
EXPLORE
- Traditional artisanal techniques and their role in this work;
- What kinds of tensions are created, what questions are raised?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
CloseI take inspiration from the history that contextualizes art as well as from the concept of the artist’s studio. I place the binary forces of creative freedom and systematic order into a sculpture installation package. The interrelations between my materials, form, and placements create a narrative linking the separate parts. The narrative is never the same from one viewing to the next. I try to create a situation where new forms, shapes, symbols, and meanings are revealed with multiple viewings.
THE WORK
Projector paint, 2015
Steel, wood, clay, plasticine, oil on canvas, drawing on paper, suspended lights
Courtesy of the artist
Projector paint mines painting. It extracts the things that constitute a painting – its form, colour, perspective, history, politics – and presents them as a projection in the form of sculpture installation. These things are extracted without precision but instead arise out of a fluid and intuitive process. What is left is an all-encompassing physical representation of the creative processes of observation, contemplation, and sensation. What you see is a snapshot of this projection but, like the physics that govern light, it will theoretically go on forever.
EXPLORE
- Painting and how this artist goes about deconstructing and examining it;
- The notion of projection and how it is made use of here.
Since receiving a positive diagnosis, I have been using skin as a “common-place”. Marking the body’s frontiers, this protective, fabricated or imaginary layer is constantly moving because of physical and psychological invasions. Spanning from the procedures of the 1930s fruitcake factories to current HIV drug cocktail therapies, my ice pick sculptures and miasma installations metaphorically occupy the body and its skin, making it a permeable and mutable vessel.
THE WORK
Aluminum Lake, 2015
Ice pick installation
Courtesy of the artist
Aluminum Lake is the colour pigment found in most foods, cosmetics, and oral drugs.
This installation explores potential narratives among life-size sculptures corrupting the skin. In a respectful gesture commemorating the late members of General Idea, the muted poodle figure addresses HIV as a status and aspires to raise awareness.
EXPLORE
- HIV and how it is represented in this work;
- How the viewer is embodied in her/his experience of this artist’s installation.