DAIKICHI AMANO
CÉLINE BOUCHER
MARIE BRASSARD
ISABELLE CLERMONT
CYNTHIA DINAN-MITCHELL
VÉRONIQUE DOUCET
IAN GAMACHE
MASSIMO GUERRERA
KENRYO HARA
GROUPE HÉCATE
ÉRIC LADOUCEUR
ARKADI LAVOIE LACHAPELLE
MERYL MCMASTER
LYZANE POTVIN
SYLVIE SAINTE-MARIE
VICTORIA STANTON
ITO TARI
CAROLINE BOILEAU
MARIE BOURDAGES (MADY)
JULIE LASSONDE
BARAH HÉON-MORISSETTE
ANNE MASSICOTTE
FRANÇOIS-ALFRED MIGNAULT
NICOLE PANNETON
BAUDOIN WART
LISETTE YOSELEVITZ
Considered to be one of the most important artists of the current Tokyo scene, photographer DAIKICHI AMANO, the self-appointed "new Hokusai", continuously pushes the limits of the bizarre. The famous etching by Katsushika Hokusai, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814), an artwork that has marked the collective imagination of the Japanese people since the Edo period, has never ceased to fascinate him.
Obsessed and inspired by the famous etching depicting a woman entwined in the tentacles of two squid, one of whom kisses her breasts while the other performs cunnilingus on her, Amano explores themes of erotic voracity and the animalistic nature of the human, motivating him to stage photographs of striking beauty.
Displaying a sublime, disturbing and uncompromising perversity, Amano’s artworks are raw, viscerally sensual and morbid; the sliminess of the eels, fish, insects and octopi clinging to the human bodies literally hits the viewer in the gut.
The selection of Amano’s photographs that will be presented in ORANGE showcases images that evoke terrifying, nightmarish, obscene and penetrating fantasies. In these strange pictures, liquefaction is no longer a state but rather a feeling; viscosity and the sensation of squirming creatures on the skin take over our bodily and sensorial imagination, pointing to the very heart of the attraction/repulsion dichotomy.
BORN IN TOKYO, 1973, LIVES AND WORKS IN TOKYO
CAROLINE BOILEAU is an interdisciplinary artist that uses installations, drawings, objects, photo, video and performance to examine the connections and possible areas of exchange between the body and its environment. In a perspective of broadening the intentions and attitudes involved in “taking care”, Boileau initiates a process of cohabitation, transformation and transmutation through the creation of fragile relationships between medicine and the domestic space.
For ORANGE, she will use potatoes and medical suction cups —humble food staples and home remedies —to incite reflection on the poetic, political and deeply human spaces existing between the raw and the cooked. Residents will be invited to follow and interact with the artist during a series of walkabouts in La Pocatière.
Through her performative actions and movements from site to site, she will explore the metamorphosis from simple to “loaded” objects. With affection and caring towards existing relationships, she will execute rituals that bring together food preparation and care of the body, quick reactions and slow execution, domestic and medical spaces, actions of solitude and actions of solidarity.
BORN IN MONTRÉAL, 1970, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
As an interdisciplinary artist having considerable experience with movement in the context of performative action and interventions in the public space, but also in her daily Taoist Tai Chi practice, CÉLINE BOUCHER is interested in body memory and the drives behind daily repeated actions in relation our individual choices and ways of being in the world.
For ORANGE 2015, Boucher will question that which seems to determine the different relationships that we maintain with our food. Apart from economic, ecological and health-related factors, aren’t these choices also informed by other motivations, buried much more deeply inside us? What are the biological, emotional and psychological factors that come into play in the food choices we make over the course of a lifetime?
With her longstanding interest in vegetarianism, Céline Boucher will attempt to bring to light the singularity within a simple food choice. She will put her relational practice to work through meetings with grocery store employees in Saint-Hyacinthe, with the goal of highlighting what is at the source of our dietary decisions, despite the fact that the origins of this decision-making process are now long lost.
BORN IN MANCHE D’ÉPÉE, GASPÉ PENINSULA, 1958, LIVES AND WORKS IN L’AVENIR AND MONTRÉAL
MADY’s singular career path is that of a marginal, precocious, gifted child in a society where her intelligence doesn’t fit in. However, she has discovered another ways of becoming part of the universe surrounding her, informed by ancient wisdom, shamanism and the archaic and visceral spirituality of nature. Essentially, her paintings are the result of a mediation between her own human nature and that of the spirits of nature itself.
Mady transcribes the spaces that bring together ancient memory and all the inhabitants of the cosmos. Each of her paintings is a sort of akasha —the sanskrit word describing a place where the memories of the universe are kept— that she finger-paints with a homemade melange of oil and pigments, transgressing the very ritual whereby the medium is manufactured. These timeless and memory-based “species of spaces” weave together past, present and future.
For ORANGE, Mady will present several new works, including La constellation de la baleine, a painting that plunges the viewer into the secret, abyssal and magical world of these fantastic underwater creatures. The exhibition Les yeux dans l’eau, presented at the Centre d’art de Kamouraska, will be accompanied by a musical work by the artist entitled Tawa, where she mixes whale songs with her own throat singing.
BORN IN BONAVENTURE, GASPÉ PENINSULA, 1966, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
Actress, stage director and playwright MARIE BRASSARD is a versatile artist whose works inhabit the space between theatre, poetry and performance art. She draws on sound, image, voice and gesture to feed her multimedia art practice.
Having acknowledged the visceral influence of Joseph Beuys on her work, she seemed the perfect candidate for a reactivation, adaptation, staging and performance of Beuys’ classic performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.
In this seminal piece, created on November 26, 1966 at Düsseldorf’s Schmela gallery, Beuys spent three hours alone with a dead hare inside the gallery space, while viewers watched the action from outside, through the window, the glass door, and on a closed-circuit monitor. Beuys carried the hare around the space while whispering inaudibly to it and showing it paintings hanging on the walls.
In this performance, Beuys attempted to demonstrate that art was principally something that must be felt and experienced, and that remains essentially unexplainable. The strategies of distancing or alienation that he employed suggest the incapacity and distance between the intellectual art world and the real world. For Beuys, art must weave itself into the social fabric.
For the 5th edition of ORANGE, we wish to pay tribute to Joseph Beuys, the figurehead of the visceral total artwork, though a celebration of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’s 50th anniversary, a milestone in the passage from modern to contemporary art.
BORN IN TROIS-RIVIÈRES, 1960, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
Motivated by sincerity and the visceral necessity at the base of the communicative act, ISABELLE CLERMONT explores the breadth of its sensory dimensions.
Although image and sound tend to dominate in her creative research, Clermont also extends her creation of mesmerizing and immersive totality to both installations and performances.
For ORANGE, Isabelle Clermont will be presenting an immersive, intimate, experimental and “total” work of art, in which the viewer will experience a visceral contact with the work. The installation, Viscérale communion/Blancheur du pain des anges, inspired by the communion wafer, quintessential symbol of the meal as ritual, questions notions of communion, shared sustenance, offering and blessing while providing a warm and welcoming experience for the viewer.
Sculpted in the very space of the gallery, her installation will be made of communion wafers individually formed and suspended from the ceiling, evoking the architectural structure of churches and chapels. These small ephemeral altars, shrouded in sound specially produced for the piece, aim to incite silent contemplation. In addition to this installation, Clermont will also present ink drawings and a video work. What remains of our beliefs related to ritual offering?
What has happened to the ritualistic aspects of eating? For the official opening of ORANGE 2015 in Saint-Hyacinthe, Clermont will present a performance where she will share spiritual, sensual and emotional nourishment with the viewers.
BORN IN GRAND-MÈRE, 1979, LIVES AND WORKS IN TROIS-RIVIÈRES
CYNTHIA DINAN-MITCHELL creates excessive and saturated environments where all elements are carefully hand-crafted, from the wallpaper to furniture and knick-knacks. In a spirit of ironic fun-poking, she takes pleasure in privileging ambiguity and confusion between decoration and the artwork as such. Her installations pose the questions: What is decoration, considered low art? What is visual art, considered high art?
For LES VISCÉRAUX, Dinan-Mitchell will present Eat Me Martha Stewart, an intimate and immersive artwork that she describes as “fully cooked”. All while showcasing Martha Stewart’s approach to table-setting protocol, refined blue motifs that evoke the shade of blue traditionally used in Japanese porcelain-making will unveil surprising and disturbing imagery, where human beings, customarily the main predators of the animal kingdom, now take their turn as prey.
BORN IN QUÉBEC CITY, 1977, LIVES AND WORKS IN QUÉBEC CITY
VÉRONIQUE DOUCET is a multidisciplinary artist and political and ecological activist who first came into the public eye in 2005 with her project Aldermac plantation minière, which led to an important ecological victory in Abitibi. For ORANGE, Doucet will present pieces from a new series of works entitled Dans les temps de tromperie universelle, dire la vérité devient un acte révolutionnaire (G. Orwell) (In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act), where the artist, through the use of raw and recycled materials (eggs, birds’ nests, seeds, apples, etc.), questions the sincerity of the food industry to save the world from hunger and famine. With the presence of so many types of food “camouflage” —artificial processing, dyes, additives, pesticides, sterilizing agents, GMOs— can we really claim wanting to develop healthy agricultural practices? In order to parse out what is true and false and denounce the seductive hypocrisy of the food industry’s main players, the artist has chosen the apple as her food of choice. The apple is the fruit offered by the first woman to the first man, the “forbidden fruit” associated with original sin, plucked from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the Garden of Eden…
In this work, with its strong feminist subtext, Véronique Doucet examines some of the ill-informed choices present in our society, and asks the question of whether anything pure and natural remains in what we eat.
BORN IN ARTHABASKA, 1973, LIVES AND WORKS IN ROUYN-NORANDA
IAN GAMACHE’s artworks, at first seemingly naive, are driven by universal preoccupations, a dark sense of humour, wit and self-mockery. Contamination, pollution, violence, cruelty, brutishness and disregard are recurrent themes in his work, whose pictorial language is based in subjective expression. He revives the traditions of neoexpressionism and postmodernism through the materiality and gestuality of painting, using materials mostly drawn from society’s detritus: torn cardboard boxes, paper bags, used books and scraps of wood found in the garbage or on the train tracks that crisscross Montréal.
For ORANGE 2015, Gamache will present Garden of Earthly Delights, an in situ immersive work dealing with the theme of hunger and our continuous struggle to eradicate it. In this “garden”, the visceral quest for food responds to both a need that is bodily and psychological, and an existential necessity for freedom and peace.
BORN IN MACGREGOR, MANITOBA, 1977, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
Since 1991, MASSIMO GUERRERA’s artistic practice has developed around the various phenomena that affect and inhabit us as humans, and the deep relationships existing between the mind/body and the other.
Guerrera works in a wide array of media, such as drawing, writing, sculpture, photography, installation and performance, shaping the fertile space of the encounter and the inner movement between shared presence and the solitude of the studio. Intimate and organic, his practice is attentive to vulnerability and the emotional variations that come into play between the poles of being together and inhabited solitude>.
Developing spaces for meeting and exchange, Guerrera practices a relational brand of performance centered on the possibilities opened up by the experience of the body and mind through eating and the questions it raises on the consumerism of our era.
For LES VISCÉRAUX, Massimo Guerrera has been invited to design an immersive artwork that will fill the exhibition space at EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe. Entitled Avec tous ceux et celles qui nous habitent, this open and sensual work will evolve and emerge throughout ORANGE 2015, inviting the public to experience both the body and all the types of sustenance necessary to the human condition, not leastly the sustenance of creation.
BORN IN ROME, 1967, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
For KENRYO HARA, writing, understood as form of bodily expression, is not limited to utilitarian, technical and practical uses. For Hara, to write is to mark out the course of a path taken, an evolution, a personal development. The life force and psyche that animate the body of the calligrapher are what drive and give meaning to his work and communicate this life force. Master of the art of calligraphy, in his work Hara excavates the ancient collective memory of the Japanese people.
Ancient Kodai-moji (Hokkaido) characters are the principal vector of Kenryo Hara’s calligraphic performances, out of which stem monumental works that speak to the living, moving body in action in the present moment.
The artist’s last name, Hara, has several meanings in Japanese, including "brain of entrails", "human or animal abdomen", and "wellspring of life". The artist explores the ancestral and genetic foundations of this life force that he was predestined to possess.
For ORANGE, he will realize several artworks based on the characters for food, eating and hunger.
BORN IN MIE, 1955, LIVES AND WORKS IN TOKYO
In 2012, Chalifour and Génier came together under the name GROUPE HÉCATE, with the goal of exploring the dynamic possibilities of drawing as a “mode of primal expression”. For this duo, drawing practice serves as a pretext for research and exploration and is thus constantly renewed. In this perspective, their collaboration is a laboratory where painting, video, cyber-art and performance are brought together.
For ORANGE, Groupe Hécate will delve into the visceral by way of a laboratory-artwork entitled Les Jardins, la mort d’Eurydice, which will deal with gardens, grain production and a nurturing mother nature in a perspective of sacredness. This artwork, taking the form of a primordial ritual existing between life and death, will explore unauthorized pollination as a reproductive strategy essential to survival. The use of the walls of the space, adorned with François Chalifour’s painting-drawings and bas-relief print-drawings, will continue onto the floorspace in an installation by Diane Génier. Squares of grass will be dispersed around a sculpture-vivarium that will become a natural habitat: a hive for a swarm of bees to call home.
FRANÇOIS CHALIFOUR: BORN IN QUÉBEC CITY, 1957, LIVES IN SAINT-BRUNO, WORKS IN MONTRÉAL AND GATINEAU
DIANE GÉNIER: BORN IN CHRYSLER, ONTARIO, 1956. DECEASED MAY 29TH, 2015
Multidisciplinary artist ÉRIC LADOUCEUR is a creative denunciator, communicative empathizer, spiritual clown and constructive ironist that makes drawings, bas-reliefs, illuminated friezes, wincing self-portraits, collectible cards and public performances.
Particularly interested in cosplay culture since 2001, this versatile artist personifies “Capitaine Midas”, a character inspired by the gold-fingered king of the same name. Disguised as a superhero, Ladouceur infiltrates into different public contexts, such as Les Jeux du Québec, creating interventions that provoke dialogue and spontaneous, festive, inclusive and pleasantly subversive actions.
For ORANGE, during urban meanderings featuring ditties that glorify food and feasting borrowed from advertising and traditional music, Capitaine Midas will extol the virtues of the Golden Carrot, his favorite food (whether raw or cooked). The project Midas Mélodies will adopt strategies of convergence, gathering and engagement, taking the form of walkabouts within Saint-Hyacinthe that will give rise to spontaneous meetings, participatory actions, artistic maneuvering and collective living tableaux.
It is now for us to seize the moment and create new possibilities in regards to our own human condition that will, one of these days, start to get hungry.
BORN IN JOUTEL, ABITIBI, 1971, LIVES IN STE-JULIENNE, LANAUDIÈRE, WORKS IN MONTRÉAL, GATINEAU AND SAINT-JÉRÔME
Julie Lassonde is an artist who uses movement, object manipulation and sound recordings to deal with themes relating to law and justice. Having in the past explored various units of measure as systems to define the limits of space and the body, she will continue this approach in relation with food’s impact on body modification and learned behaviour in a society where standardization is encouraged.
For ORANGE, Julie Lassonde will explore the contrast between bodily ailments and the pleasure of eating. During her wanderings, she will collect stories from residents of the La Pocatière region which she will then mix with sound recordings of actions associated with eating such as biting into an apple, boiling water, grating cheese, etc. In this way, she will create an original performance that highlights the personal and exterior laws that govern the pleasure of eating, our dietary choices and the effects they have on our bodies.
BORN IN MONTRÉAL, LIVES AND WORKS IN TORONTO
Every community creates its own enigmas. In partially opening themselves up to the outside, they endeavor, consciously or unconsciously, to be discovered for who they are with their own particularities: preoccupations, desires, knowledge, undertakings or simply the individuals that make them up. Welcoming or abstruse, stances taken within a community are a telling mirror of its relationship with the norms of the society it is part of, diversifying interpretations of how the social contract influences human experience.
ARKADI LAVOIE LACHAPELLE penetrates into these enigmatic worlds, navigating through outer appearances and shedding light on the order of things to the end of creating a living art, an art of meeting and collaboration, an art of seeing differently. For ORANGE, this emerging artist will take the actions of food industries in the region as her points of reference. Does the assembly-line nature of actions empty them of meaning? What of the personal motivations behind these actions? And what if, behind robotic appearances, a way of taking care of what we eat might emerge? Is there any flexibility here? Transformation of food, the self, the other… is it possible to go back to being raw once you’ve been cooked?
BORN IN L’ASSOMPTION, 1989, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉALL
For the painter and sculptress ANNE MASSICOTTE, art is intimately connected to human beings, their social sphere and their environmental choices. Founder of the Association culturelle du Sud-Ouest (ACSO), Massicotte worked on several cultural mediation projects between 1996 and 2008, notably creative workshops and exhibitions focussed on bringing together artists and members of the public of all ages.
Massicotte privileges a purely visceral approach to artmaking, taking on the role of various animals with the goal of allowing for a better grasp of the environment that surrounds us. Since 1992, for the ongoing project Un Bestiaire à notre image, she has produced over forty masks of impressive size.
These masks, made from found materials (bones, driftwood, feathers, etc.), are modeled on three types of animals: those from the distant past, those from the present day, and others representing a speculative future. The vibrant colours of these totemic animals (raven, buffalo, ram, wolf, horse, etc.) literally come to life in Massicotte’s pictorial, narrative and installation-based artworks.
The installation Le rituel amoureux des saumons and the polyptych Le rituel de la passion du cheval, as well as ten of her large-scale masks, will be presented in the exhibition VRAI ou FAUVE (in duo with Baudoin Wart) at the Maison culturelle Armand-Vaillancourt in Saint-André-de-Kamouraska.
BORN IN MONTRÉAL, 1959, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
Born into a mixed-race environment (father Cree, mother Scottish), MERYL MCMASTER explores the richness and paradox inherent to this diverse cultural background. It is indeed her roots, identity and mixed heritage that viscerally inspire her. Her young career has been marked by movements like Idle No More, aiming for the recognition and recovery of basic rights for Canada’s first peoples.
The eight works by Meryl McMaster presented in ORANGE have been selected from In-Between Worlds, a series of 21 photographs realized in 2013. Between the dream state and the waking state, between poetic worlds, these out of the ordinary moments represent attempts to unravel a complex web of identity and subjectivity, always in movement and constantly evolving.
Using the spontaneity of the photographic medium, McMaster’s production is the result of a research process that is both performative and material; she creates talismanic accessories and clothes out of paper, feathers and fabric. These creations become sculptural extensions of her body, portrayed in images where she dances and abandons herself to the wind, merging with nature in a strategy of resistance where it is beauty that comes out victorious.
Introspective and dreamlike, Meryl McMaster’s works take us on a trip between her imagination and reality, speaking to ancestral resilience and inherited force that is bicultural, multicoloured and singular.
BORN IN ONTARIO, 1988, LIVES AND WORKS IN OTTAWA
A multidisciplinary autodidact, FRANÇOIS−ALFRED MIGNAULT is a performer, painter, glass blower and sculptor. Time and temporality fascinate, motivate and, in his own words, “literally consume” him. In Mignault’s practice, glass, that malleable and transparent material with the capacity to contain time and reflect light, inspires the creation of communicating vessels and harmonious assemblages that serve as recipients and conduits for water and sand.
For LES VISCÉRAUX, François−Alfred Mignault has been invited to create an installation in the main exhibition space of La Pocatière’s Musée François−Pilote. Entitled Analème, this work is made up of several blowtorch-sculpted time-measuring devices (hourglasses, sundials, etc.) suspended from the ceiling, and an infinity symbol-shaped element —an analemma— depicting the impressive path of the sun’s movement on the floor in the centre of the space. The infinity-evoking analemma is the form produced when the sun’s position is photographed from the same position and at the same time every day for a year.
With this fusional, interactive and playful work, François−Alfred Mignault invites us to penetrate into time itself, for “time is not a subject of knowledge but rather a dimension of our being.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
BORN IN LAVAL, 1961, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
BARAH HÉON-MORISSETTE is an emerging multidisciplinary artist and developer of SICMAP (Système Interactif de Captation du Mouvement en Art Performatif —Interactive Motion Capture System For The Performative Arts). She uses SICMAP to create interactive and immersive artworks with the moving body of the artist as central element. With this system, the artist’s body becomes a real-time trigger for multiple combinations of sense and perception-based elements where electroacoustic sounds, actions and video come together, bringing about an incessant stream of variations within works whose technological and physical spaces are transformed into an inhabited world in constant mutation.
For ORANGE, Barah Héon-Morissette presents a new work whose sonorities point to both the raw and the cooked, in a composition guided by a body memory — her own — imprinted with the experience of serious food allergies. While she has often used SICMAP in concert halls and other conventional venues in the past, Héon-Morissette intends to present a portable version adapted to a sonic walkabout in La Pocatière’s downtown, consisting of performative actions that will shed light on the relationship between toxicity and viscerality.
BORN IN MONTRÉAL, 1979, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
Certain themes —daily ritual, repetition, accumulation, reuse and unveiling— recur throughout NICOLE PANNETON’s work, whether in her installations, photos or drawings. Known for her installations using all forms of textiles, Panneton’s infiltration-based relational practice explores public space through urban walkabouts (Contenant furtif, 2013-2014, and Sonder la Track, 2013 and 2015) and expanded cultural mediation (Des mailles et des mots, 2014-2015).
In these uncertain times, where it is the economy that decides whether we deserve our daily bread or not, Nicole Panneton proposes, for the mini-residence in performance art, a participatory, interactive and playful project around the idea of a utopian soup that nourishes in a new and different way…
For her walkabouts in rural areas around La Pocatière, Panneton, ever preoccupied by material and human precarity, will brew up a soup made up of unusual ingredients, with the goal highlighting our visceral connection to the profound humanity still alive and well within us.
BORN IN MONTRÉAL, 1953, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
Artist LYZANE POTVIN has a long-standing interest in human beings’ capacity for extreme violence, and the inspiration for her corrosive artworks stems from this explosive inner world.
In her self-portraits, which depict staged tragedies that are both fragile, raw and even brutal, Potvin examines the voracity of those psychopaths and serial killers that sometimes resort to eating the flesh of their victims.
Using often unusual techniques and tools, such as the blowtorch, to "destroy" and transform textures and colours, she produces oil paintings that depict bruised bodies and hungry souls.
For ORANGE 2015, five of Potvin’s large-format paintings have been selected from two series. The first, entitled J’ai tué Ted Bundy, was the subject of a solo exhibition in Paris in the winter of 2014. The second, Mes Abysses, further explores the tormented depths and horrors of the human soul.
Lyzane Potvin’s works will be accompanied by the documentary La cafardeuse, by Yves Martel, which presents a portrait of the artist. This short film was first presented in the 2015 edition of the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois film festival.
BORN IN LAC-SAINT-JEAN, 1977, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL AND PARIS
The humanistic artworks of SYLVIE SAINTE-MARIE are imbued with goodwill, disquiet, resistance and especially resilience in the face of precarity, exploitation, instrumentalization and the objectification of the poor. Famine and world hunger, which in our day and age are tantamount to organized crime and that yet are rarely the subject of public debate —and their representation— are necessarily raw.
For Sainte-Marie, who uses “poor” materials either taken from nature or that have nonchalantly been disposed of, all “leftovers” deserve a second life and renewed vocation as art objects.
Her arte povera (poor art) resurrects the dignity of raw materials (such as worn cotton and linen, bones, stones and shells) and speaks to an awareness and defiant stance in the face of the art market and consumerism.
The works presented in ORANGE 2015, assemblages of sculpted and engraved wood, drawings on fabric, utensils, etc., have been selected from her series Le Cri and Memoriam. Sainte-Marie equates these works with pebbles thrown in the ocean of silence that surrounds world hunger.
BORN IN MONTRÉAL, 1957, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
VICTORIA STANTON is one of the pioneers of transactional art practice in Québec. Her interdisciplinary artworks (interventions, actions, performative conferences, publications, photos, films and videos) highlight the complex nature of transaction and the transformative virtues of relational approaches. As an artist and researcher working in a broad perspective of human geography, she is interested in in-between spaces, the gaps between the self and architecture, objects, the site and the other.
Continuing in the same vein as many of her projects related to food, such as Cake Feeding (2001-2008) and Essen (2003-2007), realized in Québec, Canada and abroad, Stanton proposes, for ORANGE 2015, to create spontaneous communities though actions from everyday life. Somewhat in the manner of Iwona Majdan (The Dinner Project), she will penetrate into the kitchens of certain residents of Saint-Hyacinthe, transforming them into spaces of intimacy and vulnerability. In this project revolving around attitudes, stances, and behaviour related to food, hospitality and satiation, Stanton will accompany these residents to the grocery store and into their homes to prepare their favorite meal for them.
BORN IN MONTRÉAL, 1970, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
A pioneer of performance art in Japan, ITO TARI has taken a leading role in feminist art movements for 35 years. As a socially engaged artist and activist, she denounces prejudice and blindness on the part of humans that have been brainwashed for millennia.
For ORANGE, she is presenting I guess it’s better that radiation doesn’t have color……Sigh, a work referring to the nuclear accident and subsequent devastating tsunami that took place in Fukushima in March of 2011. In this video-performance work, Tari, who lives 65 km from Fukushima, in the Miyagi prefecture, expresses the ensuing disquiet that has since taken possession of her.
A friend, Megumi Aida, a ceramics artist from Fukushima, told her in July 2011 that she would have preferred the radiation to be visible, and thus easily detectable. Some months later, she reconsiders, saying it is probably just as well that the radiation is colourless. Megumi chose to stay in Fukushima, where she has had a farm for thirty years.
Directly inspired by her friend’s reflections, Ito Tari’s video performance recounts the deep and paradoxical suffering of Fukushima residents who, driven from their homes, are compelled to hastily make fundamentally life-changing decisions, often forcing them into exile..
BORN IN KOGANEI, 1951, LIVES AND WORKS IN KOGANEI, TOKYO
For this multidisciplinary artist, whose practice is informed by instinct and unorthodox ways of thinking, painting is a way of connecting with his visceral, dark and mysterious inner world.
Spontaneously conceived, his artworks transform the act of creation into a renewed passion for life. His approach is akin to automatic writing, where brushes, pencils and scrapers become the active extensions of sudden inspiration. These illuminations engender forms, textures and colours, rejecting representable concreteness in favour of symbolism, magic and the instinctual expression of intangible impressions.
Wart’s paintings, presented in the exhibition VRAI ou FAUVE at the Maison culturelle Armand-Vaillancourt in Saint-André-de-Kamouraska, speak to the singular and undisciplined path of this artist for whom continuity means continual change.
For LES VISCÉRAUX, we have asked BAUDOIN WART to update a performance that initially created a stir in the 1980s, and of which many were demanding a repeat performance. OM−LET (laissez l’homme être), consisted in a sort of multimedia ritual that foresaw the human condition that we are today more than ever victims of. Wart compares this plight with those of "chickens", whose lives are reduced to all kinds of space and time constraints and force-feeding by way of the media and consumerism.
BORN IN CÔTEAU-DU-LAC, 1960, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL
Born into a Jewish family steeped in both Catholic Mexican culture and Québec society, identity has been a long-standing preoccupation for artist LYSETTE YOSELEVITZ.
For Yoselevitz, who also masters traditional media such as engraving, etching and sculpture, in both figurative and abstract modes, video art seems the most appropriate vehicle for exploring memory driven by a cross-fertilization of the cultures that run through her.
In Yoselevitz’s practice, having experienced the loss of her father, exile and the immigration process when arriving in Québec, creation is a cathartic outlet for the trauma of uprootedness.
For LES VISCÉRAUX, she will present a striking video work entitled Écorces that depicts a performance filmed in front of the hospital where her father died. Using borscht, the traditional Eastern-European beet stew, the first dish, her father’s favorite, that her parents showed her how to cook, Lysette Yoselevitz expresses a suffering that she would rather erase but instead remains, like a persistent stain.
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BORN IN MEXICO CITY, 1972, LIVES AND WORKS IN MONTRÉAL