Une étendue apparemment infinie et tentaculaire
Exhibition
September 10 – October 23, 2010
Conversation with the artists on Wednesday September 22, 2010 at 5:30pm
Project Description
Members’ exhibition exchange with artist-run centre PAVED in Saskatoon. Curator: Nikki Middlemiss.
The drawings of Chantal Bélanger, taken from a series entitled Une espèce de cacaphonie, suggest a phonetic reading, particularly as they are comprised of scrambled text and symbols organized to follow a spiral path reminiscent of a telephone cord.
In positive voids, Véronique Malo uses video to explore how a human presence transforms the nature and rhythm of a public place. In this piece, the artist captures the repeated movements of a group of fisherman filmed while she was in residence last fall in the pastoral setting of St-Jean-Port-Joli, on the shores of the St. Lawrence river.
karen elaine spencer’s postcard project transient traces deliberately blurs boundaries by appropriating text from homelessnation.org to communicate with the “housed” as if they were the “unhoused”.
In his video installation entitled Migration Numérique, Jean-Ambroise Vesac offers local volunteers the experience of being digitalized through a collaborative process of portrait creation involving computer modeling.
This project has been realized with the support of Laboratoire de muséologie et d’ingénierie de la culture (LAMIC) de l’Université Laval and Centre DAÏMÕN through an artist’s residency.
Keys
Chantal Bélanger
1. Occasion
(définition du Petit Robert) : circonstance qui vient à propos, qui convient.
J’avais chez moi quelques feuilles de lettraset à travers diverses paperasses. Je l’ai ai utilisées, au départ en tant qu’onomatopées. À la même époque, il y en avait également chez Omer de Serres en liquidation. Voilà l’occasion de débuter un travail de dessin qui se présente.
2. Détournement de sens
Les lettres serviront non pas à rendre lisible, mais constituent une représentation sonore.
Écrire au son, écrire des sons.
3. Espace
Que l’on puisse le délimiter ou non.
Véronique Malo
1.
2. “Take, for instance, the ways in which urban spaces differ day and night, weekdays and weekends, the ways they are peopled at different times, reflecting working lives and power relations.”
– Lucy Lippard
3. “For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere.“
– Walter Benjamin
karen elaine spencer
1. i would like to acknowledge other artist’s and thinkers whose work has inspired my own practice: martha rosler, philip monk and on kawara.
martha rosler’s project, the bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems is a work that has influenced, hovered and resurfaced many times since i first came across it as a student at nscad. this work as well as her text on documentary photography can be found in: ”martha rosler, in, around, and afterthoughts”, in martha rosler 3 works, the press of the nova scotia college of art and design, halifax, nova scotia, 1981, pp. 59 – 86.
2. philip monk also offers a way of entering into thinking about quotation that i find quite interesting, quoted here from: philip, monk, peripheral/drift: a vocabulary of theoretical criticism, ed. rumour, toronto, ontario, 1979.
“
theft [theory] acts through the revaluation of language, by distortion and disguise. communication is the site of this endeavor; however, disguise is the opposite of communication. while appearing to signify, disguise diverts, devalues. communication is eminently serious: its purpose is to relay a message that has a meaning. any signal, however, tends to noise. and this noise is a drift from the use and meaning of communication. to reduce signal-to-noise ratio this drift allows desire to move disguised in noise, to distort the code for its own perverse pleasure and to assume its content within the guise of the code.
’in fact, today, there is no language site outside bourgeois ideology: our language comes from it, returns to it, remains closed to it. the only possible rejoinder is neither confrontation nor destruction, but only theft: fragment the old text of culture, science, literature, and change its features according to formula of disguise, as one disguises stolen goods.”(roland barthes)
3. and one can’t do any postcard project without noting on kawara and his i got up postcard series of 1968 -1979, where on the back of tourist postcards he stamped the time he got up. on kawara i got up . jeanne marie kusina writes about on kawara and his practice in: jeanne marie kusina, i am still alive: the search for on kawara, department of philosophy, bowling green state university, presented at the beyond the object symposium, york university, 2005. kusinaonkawara with this quote on his postcard series:
“In Kawara’s post cards there is a desire for a connection with other human beings, but there is also a tremendous amount of suspicion for the unreliability of communicative methods for conveying meaning. The work longs to reach out to others, but fears the face-to-face encounter. Therefore, it must arrive and announce itself and yet retain some of its secrecy.“
Jean Ambroise Vesac