Contenir_Percé 2011 500 salmon skins, steel grid and cables, neon, silver 35 72 x 33 x 96 centimètres Percé (Canada) |
site specific installation CONTENIR_PERCÉ presented at
LES PERCÉIDES - 3E FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE CINÉMA ET D'ART, PERCÉ (Canada)
/ August 18-20, 2011
commissioned by artistic director François Cormier
Contenir_Percé is a site specific artistic intervention that both feeds on and is fed by an architectural thinking. It imprisons a hidden matter from Percé to better highlight its properties.
This artwork takes the form of a mosaic of 500 woven fish skins dried and lacquered ordered into a piece of suspended space, a corridor set between two reflective surfaces. Each element of this installation shines and reflects ambient light by day and night to capture its infinite variety. Between wall and screen, Contenir_Percé acts both all at once as a sensor of the real and gate opened upon the imaginary. The work captures the surrounding vitality, seeks to amplify the inherent qualities of an elective matter and of the omnipresent light, an awakening to the richness of life: magma swirling, constant whirling that never ceases to order itself. Between reality and its reflection. Ode to the proliferation of life Contain_Percé is the first in a series of works that takes possession of the under-exploited resources and qualities of an environment.
In Percé, Contain harvests and processes large quantities of fishing rejects: fish skins who's smell, texture and materiality fill space in an intoxicating manner. The material is raw as nature that hosts it. It composes a unity of form and matter while each skin is attached independently, changing direction at the pleasure of passing visitors and the surrounding breeze. A structure made of stretched cables unfolds in three dimensions. Contain creates space through a flexible and scalable process. It is the qualities of the raw materials and the site that direct the final shape and location of the work. The concentration of 500 skins in a unity of dense space, revisits a preconceived definition of what a wall, a hallway or a fish skin is.
The artwork pushes the limits of perception, one that forges the experience and knowledge, action and interaction with the world. A material easy to manipulate, becomes a malleable form of intervention. Thus appears to limit point of tension at which one thing can become another, where the resistance of matter and intent are passed from one to the other and vice versa. A constant balancing out, the binding of two chaos: that of matter, and of man who ultimately is only living matter, fighting against his own disintegration. Contenir_Percé is a work on materiality, the fact that we are only living matter in the struggle for life against decomposition: the transformation, mutation, crystallisation of the living in its disappearance.