Caroline Cloutier’s Vertige calls out for empathy
Artist-run Centre Clark opens its first exhibitions with sculptures and illusions
The Pôle de diffusion de Gaspé is still months from becoming the hub of art activities in Mile End, but one of the artist-run centres that already had a presence in the former textile factory has opened its first exhibition.
The Centre Clark has reopened its galleries with exhibitions by Manon LaBrecque and Caroline Cloutier.
LaBrecque, who won the city’s Prix Louis-Comtois for a mid-career artist in December, is showing Objets de cris et de vents — kinetic sculptures that are inflated with air to simulate breathing and make sounds that evoke humans reacting to being squeezed or struck by a mechanized wooden arm.
The sounds are recorded animal calls, LaBrecque said in an interview, but they resemble the cries of people in pain. One of sculptures sounds like a baby.
But the sculptures aren’t humanoid; they are based on LaBrecque’s research into micro-organisms. Still, the sounds that result from being struck are meant to draw out an emotional reaction in the viewer, she said.
“I hope to elicit empathy from the viewer toward the organism,” LaBrecque said.
The artist, who has a background in dance, has long been making art that reflects the movement of the body. She showed a 57-second video at the 2008 Quebec Triennial that attempted to elicit an “involuntary instinctive empathy” on the part of the viewer. The subject in the video was yawning.
“My goal in these 57 seconds is to trigger an echokinesis (the compulsion or the act of imitating the movements of others) in spectators,” she wrote in the catalogue. “I want to create a physically contagious moment!”
Cloutier also seeks a physical reaction to her work, but probably not the dizziness implied by Vertige, the title of her exhibition.
The illusions she creates with mirrors and photographs of a gradated grey scale printed on self-adhesive vinyl and applied to the walls of the Clark’s smaller gallery have many dimensions. The main idea is to induce the sensation in a viewer of being in a room with corridors leading off in several directions.
The corridors are illusions of perspective that Cloutier created with triangular mirrors at the floor and ceiling, and photographs that simulate deepening shadows as the corridors recede. The openings into the passageways close as the viewer approaches them.
“Your brain, instinct and logic compete to interpret what you see,” she said in an interview.
But the goal is not just to make an illusion, Cloutier added. The room is intended to have the physical impact of a billboard, “except it doesn’t confront you,” she said. “It leads you in.”
There are also the formal qualities of the installation to consider. The mirrors are triangles and the photographs create illusions of rectangles and at least one cube.
Psychologically, the reced- ing corridors point to something that is hidden, another idea that Cloutier likes to explore in a practice that combines light, photography and architecture.
Cloutier also reverses the usual function of a mirror, which is to show an illusion of reality.
As the viewer navigates through the illusory space, it is the surface of the mirror that reveals itself as an anchor to the real, physical space of the gallery.
Cloutier is showing photographs of her Vertige exhibition — with distracting elements like pipes and ducts removed — at the Galerie Nicolas Robert in the Belgo building.
The title of this second exhibition — Vertige: les mirroirs — helps the viewer to understand the meaning of Cloutier’s mise en abyme, Emmanuelle Choquette writes on the gallery website. The mirror is “both an impenetrable reflection and the symbol of another dimension we want to dive into,” Choquette writes.
After new ductwork was installed and its floor upgraded, the Centre Clark returned to its quarters on the first floor of 5455 de Gaspé Ave., where it has street access. But the gallery also opens onto a large interior open space, where five artist-run centres will have exhibition and office space.
The five are Atelier circulaire, which has its printmaking studio in the adjoining building at 5445 de Gaspé; Diagonale, a centre for fibre artists, and three centres involved in photography and other image-based practices: Dazibao, Occurrence and Optica.
Atelier Clark, a woodworking shop, will move from an upper floor and join the galleries on the main floor, said Claudine Khelil, development officer for Centre Clark.
Also present on the main floor is a dance collective’s practice space and the office of the artist-run Pied Carré, which handles the leases for 208,000 square feet of galleries and studios in the two buildings. About 400 artists and cultural workers are in the buildings, said Carine Valleau, co-ordinator for Pied Carré.
Khelil said the idea for the Pôle de diffusion de Gaspé began after the two buildings were purchased and artists couldn’t afford the rising rents.
The provincial and municipal governments helped the artist-run centres reach a deal with the new owner that guarantees low rents for 30 years.
The artist-run centres should be ready for occupation by April, Khelil said, with a grand opening of the Pôle shortly afterward. Manon LaBrecque: Objets de cris et de vents and Caroline Cloutier: Vertige
continue to Feb. 22 at Centre Clark, 5455 de Gaspé Ave., Suite 114. Information: clarkplaza.org.
Caroline Cloutier: Vertige —
les miroirs opens Saturday and continues to March 1 at Galerie Nicolas Robert, 372 Ste-Catherine St. W., Suite 524. Information: galerienicolasrobert.com. Daniel Barrow tells stories through drawings that he manipulates and animates while projecting them on a wall — a technique older than cinema that has been likened to magic lantern shows.
Barrow, winner of the 2010 Sobey Award, will perform his new animation, Thief of Mirrors, at the Musée d’art contemporain four times in the next few weeks. English presentations are scheduled for Feb. 12 and 19, and tickets are now on sale.