Lynda has been leading an international career in the field of choreography. Since 2003 her work has increasingly shifted away from the “black box” of the theatre stage towards the “white cube” of the gallery space. Her research transposes choreographic practices into other artistic languages (visual art, architecture, film) to investigate the perception of space, the human figure and the object.

Her choreographic approach involves a constant dialogue with architecture, visual arts and cinema. She has created stage works, installations, exhibitions, concerts, films, publications and laboratories in various contexts (festivals, theatres, public spaces, museums, galleries). Her current preoccupations relate to the performativity of space and its aesthetic, social and political dimensions.

In 2009 Gaudreau initiated her OUT series, which includes a commission for the Festival d’Avignon (2009) and choreographed exhibitions for the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montreal, 2010) and the M Museum (Leuven, 2012). Out of Mies, an installation and film project about Mies van der Rohe, premiered at the Architectural Association in London in March 2014.

As OUT of SIGHT delivers a narrative and viewing experience that invites reflection on the margins of production, this document collects viewpoints from some of the project’s collaborators who offer thoughts on the state of being and thinking out, the use of light to expose, hide or disguise the gallery, the boundaries between the viewer and performer, altered states and imagined spaces, and the prolongation of images.

Choreographer and project creator

Throughout all the creative processes I’ve experienced, I can identify one constant: there is more life in everything that happens prior to the presentation than in what is actually shown. We don’t end up finding the right form, the right response, and these elements remain unshown. What would happen if we presented them anyway? What if we continued to play and experiment, and let the fiction find its own way? Here, it is not so much what is outside that is Out of Sight, but rather that which is entirely present, but that we don’t show and choose to leave out.

Lighting

As lighting designer, my primary role is to guide the viewer through the exhibition, but I also sometimes play with the viewer’s perception of the exhibition space. I’ve allowed myself to have some fun in rendering this particular space more playful, as an accompaniment to Lynda and Karina’s proposition. I also found that using household lamps brings another layer of understanding to the performers’ collaborative journey. I wanted to tone down the space, erase some of its whiteness and formal atmosphere, and especially make it a place where viewers would want to linger.

Lighting designer for thirty-years, Lucie Bazzo has collaborated over the course of her career with renowned directors such as Robert Lepage, yet without neglecting the coming generations. She has also lit contemporary dance in Montreal, notably with Lynda Gaudreau, Crystal Pite, Benoît Lachambre, Hélène Blackburn, Sylvain Émard, to name but a few choreographers she has worked with.

Her activities are not limited to the performing arts, she has also collaborated with musicians and videographers, not to mention her capacity to work outside the traditional theatre context.

Lucie Bazzo has also created light installations for the Phénomena festival.

Performer

The guided tour itself immediately evokes a subject that came up during our research on the crucial role of the body and how individuals’ presence can change the state of what we see. One of the questions that emerged during our discussions was: which body is it? Throughout the research period, I was inspired by the concept of the paradoxical body as developed by philosophers José Gil and André Lepecki. For Gil and Lepecki, all people operate within space as creators of fictional spaces, paradoxical spaces marked by the subjectivity of each individual. The paradoxical body is thus a body in transformation, in metamorphosis, erasing itself and disappearing in order to go beyond its own limits. This body experiments with all bodily states, a term used in contemporary dance to express fundamental change, irreversibility, instability and intensified space.

A performer in Montreal’s contemporary dance milieu, Karina Iraola is interested in the migration of images, their survival, and their traces in the body. In her research and creation she frequently employs strategies of citation and sampling, drawing images, gestures and copies from cinema, among other sources. She has trained in contemporary dance with the Ateliers de danse moderne de Montréal, in flamenco in Montreal and Spain, in acting in front of the camera, microphone and theatre with René Gagnon, at Ateliers Danielle Fichaud, Aria in Corsica, as well as École ProMédia. She has danced and collaboration with numerous creators, among them Rae Bowhay, Pierre Lecours, Patricia Iraola, Manon Oligny, David Pressault, Lynda Gaudreau, Brice Noeser, Lara Kramer, for the company Mandala Sitù, Aurélie Pédron, Amélie Rajotte, dramaturge and director Hanna Abd El Nour, Andrée Martin and Thierry Huard. She has also worked for a number of years as a choreographer, dancer and actor as part of the company Le Moulin à Musique who create contemporary music works for young audiences.

Set Design Assistance

Darkness erases space. Darkness creates a perceptual architecture of potentiality, a nonexistent architecture that lives in the imagination.

Annie Lebel is an architect and co-founder of Atelier In Situ, Montréal

Sound Design

To be is not necessarily to be perceived. That which is hidden (like Berkeley’s statement within its negation) inconspicuously resists sociocultural mediocrity by simply existing outside the perception of things. However, rather than merely grasping it, perception transforms its object and thus amplifies the ungraspability of what is perceived as an eternally already-lost origin. The origin becomes what it is: ungraspable. I find that considering that which is out of sight, be it imperceptible things or the ungraspability of origin, becomes an ethical and psychedelic necessity in the sense that nothing is more pragmatically fruitful than focusing on the effects of this transformative and hallucinatory relationship to things, as well as accepting and committing oneself to the ungraspability of all causes.

Alexandre St-Onge is an audio artist, a musician/improviser (bass, voice and electronics) and a sonic performer. Philosophiae doctor (PhD) in art (UQAM, 2015), he is fascinated by creativity as a pragmatic approach to the ungraspable and he has publised over ten solo works including Créatures hermétiques dans mon char bb des otages inaperçus (Grillage Absolu), Cône en tête C Ça KC l’arme chaude de l’ivresse (Grillage Absolu), Nude de chose de même (Le laps), VUEIEN (Errant Bodies Press), Semblances (Avatar), viorupeeeeihean (Oral) and Kasi Naigo (squintfuckerpress) amongst others. He founded squintfuckerpress with Christof Migone and he plays in quite a few bands which released several albums : Et Sans, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., Klaxon Gueule, Pink Saliva, mineminemine, Shalabi Effect, Les esprits frappeurs and undo. As a composer he has worked for interdisciplinary company kondition pluriel, as well as composing for artists such as Marie Brassard, Karine Denault, Lynda Gaudreau, Line Nault, Jérémie Niel, Maryse Poulin and Mariko Tanabe.

Art Collection

Walking, collecting, connecting. The studio becomes portable, moving from one pawn shop to the next, obsessed with landscape paintings and album covers. Back home, the observation of nature is refined. Doing as little as possible to connect painting and photography. A single visual element is enough. A tracking shot in the mind’s eye juxtaposes the waters of the Saint Lawrence with those of the Aegean Sea. Spaces are tiny and colossal at the same time. Unbeknownst to their authors, various paintings, photographs and films are brought together in one place.

Turntablist, improviser, sound designer and artist, the Montrealer Martin Tétreault realizes sound performances with turntables, either readymade or adapted to his needs. He has participated in numerous festivals and gatherings around sound and media art in Québec and internationally. He is associated with a number of music, dance, poetry, installation and performance projects. He has published more than fifty albums with artists from Québec and abroad. In 2004, at the request of choreographer Lynda Gaudreau, he created a system of musical notation and playing surfaces, which developed into the Turntable Quartet, who have performed and released Points, lignes avec haut-parleurs on the label ORAL. This affinity for dance continues with recent works for Le chant des sirens by Sylvain Émard Danse, and 9, by Hélène Blackburn for Cas public. In 2015, the curator Nicole Gingras published Des disques et un couteau, a monograph documenting his work as an artist.

How the cinematic is, in part, a form that links discontinuous elements and how this process can be extended and choreographed within the gallery space.

The interlacing of narrative between performance in the gallery and the breaks in the incomplete film.

The provisional ways images can be linked through video, performance, and display.

The roles the visitor takes in free, aleatory viewing, during a guided tour, or in the presence of a performer.

How the gallery performs itself through the maquette, architectural interventions, lighting, documentation of the production process, and the display of the collection.