Maryse Larivière

WILD IS THE WIND
03.09–04.22.2006
Room 2

Maryse Larivière continues her exploration of intimacy and relationship with her new exhibition, Wild Is the Wind, created during a recent residency in France.

In videos and a series of large-scale photographs Larivière presents couples, sometimes on their own and sometimes in the crowd. Men and women hold each other closely and dance out of time to a raucous music. They speak quietly, isolated from the manic activity of a football match that engulfs them. They recline together in a sun-soaked park. Regardless of their environment, however, the pairs are always in direct relation to one another; their single-minded focus mirroring that of the image’s viewer and troubling its presumed ordinariness, its normalcy.

Coolly, almost casually, composed the images suggest the informality of snapshots while being deliberately staged, so their actual position seems closer to artifice and fiction. Larivière’s purposeful distortion of these boundaries strategically disrupts conventional inscriptions of photographic literalness while stressing interpretive availability, a gesture to the works’ thematic concerns and an underlining of the erotic, not to say voyeuristic, force of the gaze in any visual representation. And, in these images, with their strange take on gender roles, on contact and its fluid limits, on the most personal forms of conviviality – living, and living together – it seems a force that might be shared, and paradoxically pleasurable rather than circumscribing.

In Wild Is the Wind, Larivière stakes out a place both about and for relationship, between her models, and more intriguingly between her images and the world, which is to say, in many important ways, with us.

Text by Peter Dubé