Yechel Gagnon

CORE/PREMIÈRE MATIÈRE
11.18–12.19.1999

The in situ proposal presented to us by Yechel Gagnon is a work that fits perfectly within the continuum of an artistic approach that embraces the twists and turns of the creative process and the resulting element of chance. Using plywood as her medium, she recently created paintings in various formats that revealed the traces of the power tools used to produce them. Thus, using a gouge, an electric router, and a blowtorch, she created several bas-reliefs that highlight both the qualities of this industrial wood and the potential for a pictorial effect. Indeed, due to its composition, this material abounds with marks, knots, and color variations, through which Gagnon has managed to highlight not only their materiality but also the dichotomy between the wood’s natural appearance and the mechanical process that reveals the artificial fabrication of the plywood.

It is thus based on certain outcomes of this process that she now presents an installation whose construction and refined forms almost create an “anti-work.” Three monolithic-looking pieces are constructed from particles resulting from the manipulation and deconstruction of the material. The reference to the manufactured product remains insofar as the artist has retained its standard dimensions.

This attitude, which amounts to a voluntary withdrawal, plays on the fine line that sometimes exists between the presence of the object and what the material itself evokes. Wood shavings become the equivalent of what remains to be built; this recycling is the recovery of the residue of an “anti-work” that thereby becomes work itself. It is a reverse path that produces a chance encounter.

Sonia Pelletier