sarah-wendt-pascal-dufaux-1-copie

Quelque part dans l’inachevé

Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux

Exhibition

Through their installation “Quelque part dans l’inachevé,” Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux appropriate that eponymous Rainer Maria Rilke quote in order to define their work as being in continuous reinvention; without conceptual or material limits, the creative process has no end. Wendt’s and Dufaux’s respective practices interweave to create a multisensory, intuitive and, moreover, moving mixture. The duo negotiates with temporality while the process of creation, representation, and reception are completely torn apart in perpetuity. The finality of the exhibition is no less discovered in its elaboration as it is also directly experienced; the proposals within, dwell as much on their own ruin as they suggest potential futures. After a performative and progressive exploration, the artists evoke all the possibilities of the incomplete: of the (un)finished (“l’inachevé”). Through the art of movement, they question the shared experiences of the post-human condition through (inter)actions applied to various constructed protean objects.


This “somewhere” (“quelque part”) — the space inside the gallery — is impalpable, elusive, and unstable. Wendt’s + Dufaux’s contributions lead to the creation of illusions, of realities otherwise inaccessible — and of allusive and fictitious aspirations. Immersive and contemplative through the variations in its scenery, the installation transposes its visitors into someplace else; a pop-apocalyptic universe. The senses of the viewer become captivated by the sensory characteristics of these objects. Visitors, therefore, become at once utopians and survivalists and participate then and there in a colourful mise-en-scène complicated by photographic and filmed images, pictorial and sculptural objects, which act to measure spatiotemporal reverberations. The performance, pre-rendered by Wendt and pre-recorded by Dufaux on the shores of Newfoundland last year, is twice over projected in the gallery, in two sequences of alternating order. Through a series of interventions, Sarah Wendt, without pretense, surveys the territory and guides the visitors into these arid lands. A landscape of frenetic sounds, incorporating the singular resonance of the French horn, intensifies the (in)actions the artist makes towards every one of these dreamlike objects.


For Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux, “l’inachevé” is a methodology that leads right into an infinite “quelque part”

— Jean-Michel Quirion

Sarah Wendt, born in Charlottetown, PEI, is a Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work often involves choreography, performance, musical scores/conducting, installation/sculpture, and is developed as a kinaesthetic response to the contingencies of collaboration. She studied contemporary dance at MainDance in Vancouver and French horn at the University of Victoria. She was a DanceWEB Europe Scholarship recipient in 2007, and the 2014 APAF Artist in Residence in Nova Scotia. Recently, she was a faculty member at the Holland College School of Performing Arts, Charlottetown, where she taught improvisation in voice and movement, contemporary dance and creative process. Her work has been shown in contexts such as: Mois Multi, Symposium de Baie-Saint-Paul, Galerie de l’UQAM, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, l’OEil de Poisson, Art in the Open in Charlottetown, Encuentro Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, Anode Festival in Melbourne (Austria), OK Quoi!? Contemporary Arts Festival in Sackville, Galerie Verticale, OFFTA festival d’arts vivants and VIVA! Art Action.

Pascal Dufaux, born in Marseille (France), living in Montreal, had studied stage design and visual arts at Concordia. He has carried out residencies at the Christoph Merian Foundation in Switzerland, the Finnish Artists’ Association. His work has been presented at venues across Canada, Mexico and Europe including exhibitions in Créteil, Maubeuge, Lille and Marseille, and festivals such as Mapping in Geneva, Festival Image in Vevey (Switzerland), BIAN and Mois de la Photo in Montreal, Lab30 in Augsburg (Germany). Since 2015 his recent work has been shown at the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati, Confederation Centre art Gallery in Charlottetown, and in the context of the Feature Art Fair in Toronto. His work is represented by Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert Gallery in Montreal.

Since 2015, Sarah and Pascal have been working collaboratively in a multidisciplinary visual art practice.

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