In recent years, the relationship between performance art and the image has been dominated by the question of documentation. As such, we commonly think of image making as a tool for capturing and communicating live works to future audiences. In other words, the action is commonly assumed to generate the image.
In contrast, Roche Photo Ciseaux invites three artists to invert the expected relationship by considering how images can be used to generate actions. During a creation residency at Centre SAGAMIE, Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, Mathieu Lacroix and Steve Giasson will develop new performances that explore photographs and other printed visuals as a performance material rather than as documentation. The resulting actions will be presented at Le Lobe (Chicoutimi), at Sporobole and at VIVA! Art Action (Montréal).
Residency at Centre Sagamie
April 24 to 28, 2017
50, St-Joseph, Alma
Performances at Le Lobe
Saturday, April 29 at 7pm
114 Bossé, Chicoutimi
Performances at Sporobole
Saturday, June 09, 8pm
66 rue Albert, Sherbrooke
Performances at VIVA! Art Action
Montréal, early October 2017
Mathieu Lacroix lives and works in Montréal. He has an undergraduate degree in Visual Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Within his practice, the theatre of the everyday is, on the one hand, emphasized and, on the other, perverted by the construction of a poetic unreal. His work has recently been shown at the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, at CIRCA Art Actuel and at la Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges in Montréal. He has also exhibited at the Musée des beaux-arts de Mont-Saint-Hilaire during the 5th Biennale du dessin, at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides (2014-2013), at Galerie Tzara in Québec (2012) and at the Centre d’exposition du Vieux Presbytère de St-Bruno-de-Montarville (2009).
Sarah Chouinard-Poirier is a multidisciplinary artist working closely with cultural and community-based initiatives in Montreal. She elaborates her performances by arranging presence, gesture, speech and object, to compose an image as sensitive as it is radical, to create her own feminist and resistant mythology. Her recent solo work focuses on spoken action and the body’s marking of space, as well as the narrative quality of actions and images. She is also interested in relational practices, care ethics and re-appropriation of narratives by people and communities.
Steve Giasson is a conceptual artist that uses a wide variety of forms and media to transgress artistic genres and to question their limits. Romantic notions of authenticity and originality are undermined within his practice, which borrows freely from both the everyday and Art History – between homage and affront – in an effort to demystify the creative process and the figure of the artists. He has 20 publications to his credit and is currently pursuing a PhD in Études et pratiques des arts (UQAM). His work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Europe.
Centre SAGAMIE is a contemporary research, creation and production centre that is open to all artists whose practices connect to issues related to the contemporary image.
The artist-run centre LOBE develops itself on three complementary axes: creation, presentation and mediation, so as to bridge the continuum between artist’s work and the brouhaha of events; between art, theory and action; between the object and the performative.
Sporobole is an artist-run centre that acts as a catalyst for artistic enquiry and creation through encounters between artistic practices and fields of knowledge in the digital age.
Image (from left to right):
Mathieu Lacroix, À l’ombre d’une conjoncture linéaire, 2015. Photo: Christian Bujold
Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, BREAK ! (2016). Photo: Francis O’shaughnessy
Steve Giasson, Performance invisible No. 110 (Faire de la rétention d’information), 2016. Photo: Daniel Roy
