From September 03 1999 to October 03 1999
Lignes de fuite
Nicole Jolicoeur and laura jeanne lefave (Montréal)
Exhibition: September 3rd - Octobre 3rd 1999
As part of Mois de la Photo organised by VOX Populi, La Centrale asked Nicole Jolicoeur to create a joint exhibition project and invite an artist at the beginning stages of her career to work with her. In this manner, La Centrale continues its program of intergenerational exchange begun several years ago.
Nicole Jolicoeur has chosen to work with laura jeanne lefave. Together, they have developed a way of proceeding in which critical interaction and exchange about their works is enriching and introduces a kind of porosity of ideas and manners of the other.
For Lignes de fuite, both Nicole Jolicoeur and laura jeanne lefave present works that are the result of these exchanges and at the same time are a continuation of their respective research on subjectivity and representation.
In this exhibition, Nicole Jolicoeur has taken an approach to representation that gives the performative act a significant place. Preoccupied by the way a face becomes a screen and projects meaning, she amuses herself by distorting her own face with a silk veil and that of Thérèse Martin by cutting up photographs taken at various periods of her life. Through the play of fabric, pleats and photographic fragments, we discover constantly changing faces: an infinite number of looks and appearances that at times are exuberant, monstrous or imperceptible and at other times transparent and fleeting. The gallery is transformed into an unstable place where attempts are made to change the practice of photography, freeing it so it is no longer bound by the severity and fixedness of its procedures.
laura jeanne lefave
In her video installation, laura jeanne lefave works with sequences of images that show a woman running on a treadmill and looking at herself in the mirror. Interested in recording the body and subjectivity in a virtual and public space, the artist uses an exercise room and its mirrors as a place to do research. She starts by taking apart various shots of the same scene and then creates a new sense of movement: by splitting repeated gestures, the body is immobilised and is kept in a state of trembling, repetition and syncopation. In a transition between real space and that of desire, the mirror becomes “a surface inviting an encounter that never takes place.”