Caroline Cloutier

VERTIGE
01.16–02.22.2014
Room 2

The effect of instability and strangeness found in Labrecque’skinetic objects resonates on another level in Vertige, an installation by the artist Caroline Cloutier. Cloutier seeks to provoke a sense of imbalance and disorientation within the viewer’s body. Upon entering Clark’s small gallery, the viewer finds him/herself confronted by an apparently empty space, void of any objects, but which seems to have undergone an astonishing expansion while maintaining its original form. A series of trompe-l’oeil images that replicate and elongate the space are strategically placed on the room’s four walls. Made from seven bands of adhesive vinyl that photographically simulate the degradation of light on a white wall, along with 14 mirrors installed in pairs at the top and base of each band, the installation transforms the architectural volume of the room through optical illusion, and the exhibition space is multiplied by seven perpendicular corridors, with no discernable exit. Since the viewer has to move through the room in order to find the right angle for each corridor, and because it is impossible to perceive the entire installation at once, ones’ perception of space becomes destabilized and vertiginous. Through its fake but realistic passageways, Vertige places the white cube in a mise en abyme by playing with the specific characteristics of this over-encoded space. The reflective function inherent to this spectacular photographic image is inverted so that it becomes the vector for an expanded site that is no longer the object of contemplation or representation. Cloutier unfolds the site according to minimalist codes, and refolds it as an optical expansion of space; an operation that is familiar to the baroque aesthetic in which folding and unfolding make material space spill out into these illusory cavities of unknowable depths. It’s also through this lens that the installation constitutes a kind of heterotopia: a space that is ‘other’, that while referring to the actual presence of a place, makes the same place unreal by opening it up to furtive passageways where our imagination is invited to roam into another world, multiplied seven times over.

Bernard Schütze

// The second part of VERTIGE will simultaneously be presented at Galerie Nicolas Robert from February 1st untill March 1st, 2014, (372 saint-Catherine O. Space 524, Montreal). The photomontages of the exhibition VERTIGE, mirrors, pursues Cloutier’s reflection on the photographic “mise en abyme” in dialogue with the installation presented at CLARK. //

Caroline Cloutier would like to thank the CALQ, Centre Sagamie, Circa, Nicolas Robert, Lisa Charpentier and Louise Viger.