La fabrication de l’espace

“Structuring Space” (Architecturer l’espace)

A visit to Andrée-Anne Dupuis Bourret’s studio is a fascinating and unique experience. Paper proliferates everywhere, on the floor, on the tables and on the ceiling; papers of all shapes and colours are assembled in a multitude of different ways, all the result of the artist’s experimenting. Her accumulation of material is compulsive, yet disorder does not reign in the studio. All is ordered, classified or methodically stored, a sign of the artist’s rigour.

Several years ago, Andrée-Anne Dupuis Bourret began to distance her work from the figurative, from the two-dimensionality of printmaking and from the artists’ book, daring to take an interdisciplinary approach to print media, a pioneering process young emerging artists increasingly share. Since her master’s studies and even more so with her doctoral research, the artist is interested in hybrid systems, sculpture and modular installations.

Dupuis Bourret is known for creating modular installations with “fortune-teller” origami-inspired shapes that invade space with their sprawling tentacles. For the exhibition at CIRCA art actuel, she continues to use repetition, but explores forms less suggestive of origami. Moving from the geometric to the organic, her work becomes more intuitive, less controlled. For the artist, the motif dictates the form the work will take. Like an architect or a scientist, she imagines prototypes, draws the plans and makes adjustments to understand the material and how it is changed, repeated and modulated in her hands.

Andrée-Anne Dupuis Bourret’s La fabrication de l’espace (fabrication of space) evokes a landscape both real and fantasized, a recurring theme in her work. Instead of the red and black “fortune-teller” origami shapes, or the geometric forms placed on the ground, the viewer is confronted with a more aerial installation. On the ceiling, hoops of black and white paper with lined and pixelated patterns fit into each other, hanging weightlessly on threads. This accumulation of paper, an assemblage created with silk-screened and twisted sheets of paper, suggests clouds. On the ground, several large black stones made of crumpled paper punctuate the visitors’ circuit. More than ever, this becomes the subject of the installation. Immersive, the work is a path for the body and the senses to experience; it summons tactility and calls into question visual and spatial perceptions. Moving through the gallery, the viewer becomes aware of the limits the elements of the installation impose and must remain attentive and conscious of their movements, leaning or going around the masses when necessary. This proliferation of material—along with the shadows cast on the gallery walls—contributes to confounding the visitors and to constructing their subjective experience of the work and its environment. This is an idea that inspires the artist. Influenced by science, nature and architecture, Dupuis Bourret’s universe is situated between fiction and reality. With its flexibility, its ambiguity and its ever-evolving nature, the work of Andrée-Anne Dupuis Bourret surprises every time.

Isabelle Riendeau

Translated by Karen Trask

Andrée-Anne Dupuis Bourret’s approach to art making begins with a reflection on the perception, representation and use of space. She is interested in the threshold between real and imagined space and explores these two instants like a movement between the exterior and the interior – a circling between thought and reality. Her projects take various forms: collaborative and evolving site-specific installations, paper sculptures, images, photographic documentation and artist’s books.

Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, United States, Mexico, Holland, Italy, Israel and Australia. She has received many research and travel grants. Her artist’s books are found in collections both inside and outside Canada, notably, the University of California, Berkeley and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, she received the Governor General of Canada’s Gold Medal for her Master’s degree project and currently she is working towards a PhD. on interdisciplinary approaches using print media, specifically in connection with modular installation at Université du Québec à Montréal. She teaches printmaking, and also is the author of two research blogs: Le cahier virtuel and Le territoire des sens.

http://www.aadb.space/
http://www.aadb.space/blog/

Isabelle Riendeau is an art historian and museologist. Since 2009, she has worked at the Ville de Montréal’s Bureau d’art public as a cultural development agent and specialist in cultural mediation. She currently is pursuing a doctorate in museology, mediation and patrimony at Université du Québec à Montréal. Her thesis focuses on the exhibition and mediation of dialogic and participatory practises in the museum context. In the course of the past fifteen years, she has worked for various cultural organizations, assuming notably the direction of Galerie Verticale and ARTPRIM. Isabelle Riendeau has organized exhibitions as an independent curator, writes for various publications and has presented talks on public art and cultural mediation. Her recent publications include two essays on the artist, Tino Sehgal, (Espace Sculpture, 2012 and Muséologie, 2014). In 2014, she presented her research on Rirkrit Tiravanija at the ACFAS conference and in 2015, her work on the art of Massimo Guerrera at the Universities Art Association of Canada.