Wired Women S@lon 97 : Presentation of Montreal Double Life Clips

ARTIST PRESENTATIONS
Thursday, June 13, 7PM
Admission: $5, *FREE* for members. 
Refreshments will be served

@ STUDIO XX – 4001 Berri (corner Duluth) space 201

Reminder – exhibition Double Life | Olga Kisseleva
Inaugurated on May 9, Olga Kisseleva’s exposition Double Life is on until the 13th of June.

Wired Women 97 – Presentation of Montreal Double Life Clips

Initiated in 2007, Double Life has been developed as a collaborative project involving artists from every city in which it has been shown. Artists from Paris, Rennes, Moscow, Bucharest and Madrid, to name a few, have created video content to complement Kisseleva’s artwork and, so far, more than 10 diptychs have been produced. In this vein, during a workshop held on May 11 at Studio XX, Olga Kisseleva launched a creative project producing new video clips to incorporate into her work, Double Life, which this time will be made by Montreal artists.

On June 13, the Wired Women Salon 97 will present, for the very first time, the Double Life videos made by local artists David Champagne, Stéphanie Lagueux and Jonathan L’Écuyer as well as Isabelle Mathieu. They will talk about their career paths and their artistic endeavours and reveal the diptychs they have created. The Franco-Russian artist as well as curators Natacha Clitandre and Mariève K. Desjardins will also be in attendance for the project’s presentation. The clips presented by the Montreal artists during these last weeks will then travel with the work…

David Champagne has a diploma in photography from Matane Cégep. Working primarily in documentary form, he is passionate about humanity: our behaviors and our lifestyles. He also works with photo-montage – modifying and transforming his documentary photographs into works that are surreal, humourous and political.

In order to make ends meet, David Champagne started working for a waste management company in the fall of 2012. His Double Life project is a diptych of two photographic sequences that document, in real-time, two of the tasks required for his subsistence employment.

Stéphanie Lagueux and Jonathan L’Ecuyer are media artist who work individually and collaboratively on projects, including their life together raising three children. Their artistic approach intersects media with matter and ideas and they seek, above all, to intrigue the viewer with the resulting machinations. Lagueux and L’Ecuyer both earned a BA in Art and Design from the Université du Québec en Outaouais in 1998 and quickly became practicing artists involved in artist-run centers, Axis NEO-7 and DAIMON.

Lagueux’s work has been exhibited all over Québec (Studio XX, Vidéographe, Vidéo Femmes, Rimouski Regional Museum, 3e imperial), including the video installation The Social Body.   She is also Studio XX’s webmistress and director of Matricules Archive.  L’Ecuyer works in both multimedia and as a carpenter, and his artistic concept is to render sound visible.

Together Lagueux and L’Ecuyer have been developing an installation and video game called “Pillow Talk” in an artist-in-residence co-production at 3e impérial, centre d’essai en art actuel, and this work factors into their Double Life project which takes place in two beds. One video-bed represents family life, and the other features the “Pillow Talk” installation which invites the public to lie down on the bed and play a video game.

Born in Sainte-Rosalie, Isabelle Mathieu is a proud boxer and defender of learning by lived experience. She obtained a double DEC in drama and visual arts; and while pursuing an Olympic career she works as a waitress and sommelier. Her boxing career path is the subject of her research and creation in her BA studies in visual and media arts at l’Université du Québec à Montréal.  She also paints and is naturally drawn to performance: some of her site-specific works are at the gym where she questions the codes around boxing culture.

Isabelle Mathieu’s video is a choreography of improvised gestures and movements, inspired by the shadow boxing that she does in her training.

She dances because she was forbidden to, she boxes because she was told to sit down: “Fiery, one two three, short poetry of beatings and fragrance. Dance, one who shows my dementia. The fist and boxing, it’s the same fight. Jab, direct, hook, finish strong.”

The curators and the artist are grateful to Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and Consulat general de France à  Quebec for their support. They also want to thank Studio XX.