Monthly Archives: January 2007

Study of a phenomenon or the invention of a memory

From the 26 January to the 25 February 2007, Julie Andrée T. undertook a site-specific residency at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE. The artist has produced a considerable body of work, and her installations and performances have brought her international recognition. She has been a member of Black Market International since 2002, and regularly collaborates with other artists, including Dominic Gagnon and Benoît Lachambre. From time to time, she co-directs works by the PONI collective and has also been a member of the experimental theatre group PME, directed by Jacob Wren.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The relationship between the body and space is a fundamental area of exploration in the work of Julie-Andrée T. Étude d’un phénomène ou l’invention d’un souvenir forms part of a body of work that has been ongoing for some time, centering on the relationship between the human and nature. The project is inspired by current interest in climate change, and particularly the natural disasters that it produces, in a context where the media often serves to distort the perception of the population.

Julie Andrée T. presented an installation at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE that sought to construct the fragmented memory of a natural disaster. Her interpretation of climate was based on a range of references and media, developing an aesthetic of disaster in which it is difficult to gain access to information.

The installation was divided into four sections that interacted to create a strange habitat. The first section consisted of three pictures made of squares of white ceramic. In the first picture, one of the white squares was replaced by a small screen displaying images of an erupting volcano. In the second picture, two small speakers took the place of white squares, and played recordings of disturbing sounds and stories of disaster. Smoke came from the third picture, by means of a similar device. A glass screen placed in front of each picture prevented us from coming directly into contact with the works. As a whole, the triptych conveyed the impression of a natural disaster by means of three different senses: sight, sound and smell. The ensemble evoked the feeling of segmented memory.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

At the far side of the exhibition space, a concrete block leant on a wall that bore the outline of a forest in red and off-white. Drawn upside down, the heads of the trees seemed to flow like blood from the ceiling. On the wall perpendicular to this, another forest, on its side, seemed to fall to the floor. This flood of red, which seemed a response to the block of concrete, signaled another natural catastrophe, laying bare the tension that exists between man and nature.

The third section of the installation consisted of another piece of concrete leaning against the wall. To the right, rectangular plaster moulds burst up from the floor. They seemed to float above the ground, as though time stood still. This created the feeling of being witness to a meeting that had been interrupted. The fixed feeling of the scene was accentuated by the weightiness of the materials used. A mysterious substance that resembled blood emerged from the left and right side of the concrete, as though an accident had taken place. Given that the trace on the right was more marked, one surmised that the second accident was more recent. These traces of ‘blood’ gave a pictorial feeling to the space, harmonizing with the drawings that the artist had chosen to include.

Before entering the space, there was a sense that the elements were moving, communicating amongst themselves, and the feeling that they had suddenly frozen to preserve the secret of their story. This effect contrasted with the three pictures, which seemed instead to be communicating something that cannot directly be perceived.

The viewer felt obliged to keep a distance from the elements on show, a distance that marked out this residency from other projects by Julie Andrée T on the theme of climate. For her project Prudence Volontaire, presented at Le Lobe in 2004, the artist created parloirs-isoloirs (self-contained spaces) featuring a series of micro-climates designed as situations that would provoke meeting with viewers. The artist worked again with the reality of climate in Weather Report/Potentiels évoqués, presented at SKOL in 2005. On this occasion, she developed structures in which viewers could enter directly into contact with different artificial climates. The spectator’s senses were thus called to react to conditions of heat, fog and wind…

By contrast, at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE the artist presented the audience with sealed elements, something like a bottle that it is impossible to open. Instead, viewers had to fix the fragments of the work together, enabling them to re-transcribe, in their own way, the memory of the natural disaster that had taken place.

Julie Andrée T. likes to work outdoors with elements taken directly from nature. On occasions, she creates shelters as with La Salle Commune, which featured in the Espace Blanc event held in Rimouski in 2005. So it was that during her residency at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, Julie Andrée T. staged a performance, working along the shores of the Saint-Charles river for the day. This site has born the brunt of pollution and symbolizes natural disaster for the artist.

For the performance, Julie Andrée T. collaborated with Francis Arguin in attempting to create links between the two banks of the frozen river. This action underlined the ephemeral nature of the river and the various conflicts to which it has been subjected in a succession of redevelopments.

The performers began on either side of the river, each tied to their respective riverbank by a cord knotted around the waist that limited their movements. A series of actions followed in which the two protagonists interacted, creating a dialogue between the two riverbanks. With the help of shovels, they exchanged snow. Other actions took place independently, such as the use of traffic cones to call out to moose. The repetition of their movements gradually formed a pathway of water linking the sides of the river. A conversation had been established.

The site gradually changed shaped. Road signs marked the pathway, displaying arrows or circles, always pointing in opposite directions, along with cords that created obstacles to direct contact between the riverbanks. A red liquid appeared in the center of the river, evoking blood: a distress signal. The tensions generated by these communication problems between the human and his environment echoed those in the LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s exhibition space.

Further to this series of actions, the performers’ bodies also featured in the aesthetic of the work as a whole. In different sections of the performance they adorned themselves with self-adhesive strips. Those worn by Julie Andrée T. were blue, whilst Francis Arguin wore red strips. As with the road signs, these features further added to the marking out of the space.

After a while, the performers changed positions, each completing the semi-circle on the ground that the other had begun, also exchanging self-adhesive strips. Gradually the differences between them gave way, revealing two bodies linked by the same colors. Although they never met each other directly, through their actions they ended up resembling, merging with and understanding one another.

In devising a new set of markings for the river, Julie Andrée T. gave the river a voice. At the end of the conversation, the site had changed meaning by way of the set of references hat unfolded form the use of natural materials and road traffic objects. This redefining of the relationship and connotations that exist between place, bodies and objects prompted spectators to reflect on their own identity and environment.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

This intervention at the Saint-Charles river can be read as a fragment of the installation presented at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE. In the case of both works, nature calls out to a humanity that understands little of its distress. In devising a poetry of the unfamiliar by means of everyday references, Julie Andrée T. created the paradoxical feeling of taking the viewer closed to a beyond that is as unknown as it is familiar.

DIY inventors, or Les Patenteux, of Quebec: La Collection sound performance evenings

“A patenteux is someone who does things that others have never done and who has imagination within.” 1 – Mathilde Laliberté

It is no accident that for a number of years LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE has held audio performance evenings. Such events have a strong link with the art center’s mandate, which focuses on the promotion of site-specific and installative art practices, whether in terms of their dissemination, production or documentation. 2

The La Collection series of events took place from January to March of 2001 and involved the furthering of links in the field of contemporary visual arts practice, by way of the involvement of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, (MNBA), and their Prêt d’œuvres d’art (CPOA) collection. The principle was simple and yet at the same time extremely interesting, to use art works loaned from the collection as the basis for the creation of sound works, presented in front of a live audience. The artists invited by LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE to participate in the events each chose a work from the collection and used it as the inspiration for an audio performance, which also featured the original visual art work.

The link between sound art and the visual arts can be superficial: how many times have you witnessed performances involving audio and video in which there is nothing linking the elements, and the relationship between visual and auditory experience, other than artifice and gadgets ?! That said, LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s choice of sound artists resulted in a complete osmosis between creativity and inspiration in works presented across five evenings. The series included one event that took place at the MNBA, in an exhibition space dedicated to the colossal Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg by Jean-Paul Riopelle, an artist who has been omnipresent in Quebecois culture since the sixties.

The sound artists invited to participate in the project had one thing in common : the ability to work with new instruments or better still to create a new array of stringed instruments – instruments of their own that acted as forms of audio sculpture – revealing a further link between the visual and audio arts.

Martin Ouellet, January 25, 2007

Selected work: Lointain indéterminé no 3 and no 4, by Jean Lantier, 1998-1999, acrylic on wood.

For this work, the creator presented a discrete, almost unobtrusive form of instrumentation. The audience found themselves asking just how Ouellet – who was seated with them – had managed to produce his sounds, which all traveled in the same direction, as Lantier’s strange and blurred diptych looked on.

A system of rigid plastic tubes and cylinders made its way to the artist’s chair. We soon understood that the buzzing in our ears was being produced by the orchestrator and stringed instrument maker that is Martin Ouellet, as he sat, concentrating and moving his fingers at the extremities of his “pneumatic” system. An air compressor secreted in the entrails of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE provided the necessary ammunition to produce the sounds. This was a contemplative work that combined high and low frequencies. The resulting audio effect was perfectly concordant with Lantier’s work.

With striking simplicity, Martin Ouellet performed a short minimalist work, which followed the slow auditory experience with which he began the evening. A pierced beer can attached to a long piece of string turned above his head, gradually making its way over the heads of the audience. The subtle variations in acousmatic sound were captivating, with the auditory experience varying for each listener according to their position in space and the speed and height of the object.

Maxime Rioux,February 8, 2007

Selected work: Assemblée phosphorescente, Proposition no 1, by Pierre Bruneau, 1995-1998, phosphorescent pigment and acrylic on canvas.

Since 1996, Rioux’s audio work has focused on his “Ki robots”, a system that he has invented that enables him to animate acoustic instruments with the help of inaudible base frequencies. The artist used several of these robots in his creation of a soundtrack for Pierre Bruneau’s multi-panel work consisting of several canvases of varying sizes that, to the naked eye, appear blank. The space was bathed in a near-total darkness, as projectors lit up the robots from beneath or above so fragments of phosphorescent images (profiles of Gainsbourg, a portrait of Lenin) were revealed by a person shining a bright lamp on Bruneau’s work.

The movement of the robots – primitive sculptures composed of string, metal wire, steel blades, familiar forms of container, wooden drumsticks, cymbals, etc. – created a strange sound track that was both percussive and tribal, plunging the audience into two layers of observation: the movement of the sculptures and that of the fragmentary characters that appeared on the wall.

Raôul Duguay, February 21, 2007

Selected work: Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg, by Jean-Paul Riopelle, 1993, mixed media.

As a poetic homage to the life and work of the immense figure that is Riopelle, Duguay’s contribution to the series was singular. Accompanied by a multiflutist and a taped soundtrack, this omni-creator (sic) accompanied himself from time to time, playing trumpet, delivering a work that evoked the thirty panels of the fresco by Riopelle, who passed away in 2002. The instrument invented by Duguay – his phonetic poetry – explored Riopelle’s imagery with skill and sincerity in a resolutely beat and jazz work.

Frédéric Lebrasseur, Lyne Goulet and Marco Dubé, February 22, 2007

Selected work: Dragons et dragonnes, by Fabienne Lasserre, 1998, acrylic on paper.

For this performance, the selected work was literally integrated into the creative process. Frédéric Lebrasseur, a percussionist and patenteux, and Lyne Goulet, a multiflutist, asked the video maker and VJ Marco Dubé to create a real-time mix of images of works by Fabienne Lasserre. This videographic work, projected onto the wall, served as the inspiration for the duo’s improvisation, in an approach that evoked the era of silent cinema when live musicians accompanied film screenings. Thus, various vignettes of Dragons et dragonnes functioned as an inspiration on two levels.

Following the purist traditions of contemporary experimental music and improvization, the duo structured a performance that began from “point a” and made its way to “point b” without the slightest stasis. The work involved a great deal of movement, echoing the movement and expressions of the characters in the chosen work. Using voice, cymbals, African percussion, saxophone and flutes, the duo staged an effective and at times fantasy and image-laden recreation of the narrative in Dubé’s video score, and its mix of colorful personalities from Lasserre’s work.

Sabin Hudon and Catherine Béchard, March 1st, 2007

Selected work: Fascination no 6 and no 7 (dissolution), by Patrick Bernatchez, 2002, acrylic and resin on mirror and wood.

The first live performance by this multidisciplinary artist duo featured sculptures that generated sounds, but in a different register from those found in the work of Maxime Rioux, as much in terms of their sonority as their aesthetic.

Hudon and Béchard’s work featured a universe of “micro-sounds” – forms of friction, buzzing, random melodies and slow movements – along with fragile-looking sculptural elements controlled by two computers. The performance was acoustic, as the generative elements remained un-amplified. The sounds produced by the various elements of the work, spread out here and there, travelled subtly thanks to the natural reverberative qualities of the space.

The soundtrack created by the duo was in perfect synergy with the inherently minimal quality of the art work that they had chosen. The performance was both visually and aurally captivating and arresting.

  1. Grosbois, Louise de, Raymonde Lamothe and Lise Nantel. 1978, Les patenteux du Québec. Montréal: Parti pris editions, p. VIII.
  2. As part of its artistic mandate, LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE offered the Quebec public a series of exciting contemporary performances centered on the chosen thematic. These moments of creation demonstrated once agin that visual art is a creative and inspirational vector for the conception and devising of audio art and new music forms, even more so when the makers in question have the heart of a patenteux…