Manon Labrecque

Plaintes
01.13–02.26.2005
Room 1

The passages between contemporary dance, video, sculpture and kinetic installation seem, in the case of Manon Labrecque, to inscribe themselves in a pure continuity. At the heart of this artist’s practice, now recognized as one of the most important representatives of video art in Quebec and Canada, the distinct systems of the body, the machine and video processes, come together in expressing a recurring preoccupation: movement and its mechanisms.

In Gallery 1, Labrecque presents a previously unshown video installation entitled L’Appel (2004) and the kinetic and sound sculptures, Les Guérisons, created in 2003 at the Centre Est Nord Est (Saint -Jean-Port-Joli). The aesthetic experience to which these works call us positions itself in a kind of logic of duration, where the gaps, delays and retreats are metaphorical figures for waiting.

With L’Appel, Labrecque reiterates her reflection on states of presence, one of the essential themes of her work. In this installation, which puts a photograph and a video in tense relation to each other, she broaches, with intensity and emotion, the subjects of solitude and incommunicability through a troubling dialogue of the deaf.

The three sculptures comprising Les Guérisons evoke, in their turn, the most powerful and primordial vital pulse, that of breath, through a cyclical animation accompanied by melancholy whistling. Indissociable from the movement of the body, this process – without beginning or end – causes the shaking of supple forms, which, on the rhythm of a muffled lamentation, charge up and bring themselves down, as if they were animated by a harmony of emotional states.

NdeB

Translation by PduB