Clairière
OPENING: Thursday January 16, 5:30 pm
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
At the threshold of thought, an idea begins to take shape.
At the threshold of the body, stimuli enliven one’s perception.
At the threshold of the installation, one sees an intriguing and exciting place.
At the threshold…, nothing is certain, everything is possible.
The intention at the heart of duo Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux’s Clairière exhibition is to explore and observe how the body’s sensory potential generates sensory effects. Thus, the idea is to visit one’s liminal space and become aware of one’s impressionable perceptions. The installation presents a world of soft shapes, bright colors and captivating textures. Wide, interwoven strips of textile are stretched from floor to ceiling, and weave their way around to create a sensually delightful chamber. Here and there, some strangely shaped somatic sculptures seem intent on slipping through the net, infiltrating the space until they litter the floor. Immersed in the artwork, some people may experience an ambiguous feeling, that of being on the edge of familiarity and strangeness. This is because the installation is about the senses, rather than the meaning.
With their a sculptural project that evokes a kind of uncanniness, Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux succeed in a subtle, ingenious and disconcerting way of inhibiting one’s usual sensory pathways. Their Clairière installation provokes particularly effective perceptual-cognitive dissonances. Why is this so? Because our brain perceives artworks and processes them according to the perceptual modalities they trigger (I perceive) and the cognitive processes they activate (I recognize). Our brain systematically evaluates and appreciates what one sees in a desire for recognition. When faced with an object one can’t identify, the brain won’t be passive. This impossibility produces perceptual-cognitive dissonance. The situation can then become uncomfortable, at least for as long as one tries to attribute a narrative meaning to it.
And what about well-being? Well-being is also central to the artists’ intentions. It is not a coincidence that their inspiration comes from Snoezelen, the concept of two Dutch therapists who in 1974 developed a sensory room to treat people who have sensory issues or live with an autism spectrum disorder. For Clairière, the artists use this therapeutic method of immersion and multisensory stimulation and invite us to experience the installation through our senses, while experimenting with a form of sensory translation. The aim is to discover how to inhabit the interstice between sensory spaces. This exploration opens the way to more subtle, less immediate aspects of perception, based on uncertainty, heterogeneity and constant change, while stimulating feelings, memory and the affect.
Ultimately, this is also a wake-up call and an act of resistance that Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux propose in response to what’s happening around us, to a community that’s at loose ends, disturbed and angry, tossed about by so many disconcerting changes and, increasingly, confronted with political, social, economic and environmental anxiety. Clairière is a call to slow down, to relax the mind and the body … to look to oneself, into oneself.
– Texte by Émilie Granjon
Artists biography
Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux, working as a duo since 2017, explore an encounter between dance and the visual arts, inspired by the energetic exchanges that take place between body, space and matter. Their collaborative methodology imbues each of their projects with strange forms of temporality and corporeality. Their work has been presented at museums, artist-run centres and performance festivals in Canada, Europe and the UK. Their most recent solo exhibition ‘Miel du Temps’ was presented at the Musée d’art de Joliette. They live and work in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal.
Author biography
Émilie Granjon holds a DESS in Cultural Organization Management from HEC Montréal, which she obtained in 2015, and has been running the CIRCA Art Actuel artist-run center since May 2016. She is also an essayist and art critic, as well as an independent curator. With a PhD in semiology from UQAM in 2008, she analyzes the cultural issues of current art through the study of unusual figures. In her thesis, she focused on the semiogenesis of alchemical symbolism in Atalanta fugiens (1617), and published Comprendre la symbolique alchimique (PUL: Québec, 2012). In contemporary art, she co-authored with Fabienne Claire Caland Cinq fabricants d’univers dans l’art actuel (Nota Bene: Montréal, 2017) and, more recently, also with Véronique La Perrière M. Le miroir, la métaphore et le temps inversé (Sagamie: Alma, 2020).
