Patrice Duhamel: La vie matérielle

Exhibition

May 13 – June 12, 2004
Artist’s Talk on Saturday May 22 at 3pm

Project Description

We may not always be aware of it, but the relationship with our material and social environment is governed by social conventions that ease our integration into the world. Patrice Duhamel rethinks the way we interact with reality through a body of work in which staged situations depict characters whose behaviours deviate from the norm. His project, composed of two video projections and a series of drawings, occupies both galleries at Skol.

At first glance, the actions and the gestures made by the characters in the videos, as well as their relationships, seem absurd and confused. Upon closer inspection, we see that they expose a vital experiment in which nothing is taken for granted; no object has a pre-determined function and there is no pre-established relationship. In this context, relational misfire inevitably occurs. Echoing the video work, the drawings in the exhibition represent relational and behavioural prototypes. For Duhamel, this combined approach contributes to the emergence of new ways of thinking about our social relationships, or at least translates them into images.