NO WAVE
OPENING: Thursday, January 15, from 5:30 p.m.
CLOSING: Saturday, February 28, from 5:30 p.m.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Marie-Claude Lepiez belongs to the Xennial micro-generation, a cohort pinned between Generation X and the Millennials. Her work digs into the information lost in this singular gap, this rift between the analog era and the digital boom. Fascinated by the DIY spirit and everything that embodies the utopia of non-commercial artistic freedom, Lepiez sets out to reproduce this disorder by creating a no wave performance, a musical movement akin to Dadaism that rejected the traditional codes of rock. Thumbing its nose at the all-powerful new wave, no wave spread its dissonant, deconstructed counter-aesthetic through various makeshift venues in New York at the turn of the 1980s. Products of the same era, the movement and the artist are brought together here in a visual and sonic experience that makes some noise.
In an age when everyone has to be going somewhere, Lepiez invites us to go around in circles. In an endless choreography where sculptural, pictorial, kinetic and rhythmic works fit ingeniously together, she bridges the gap by setting her analog and digital practices in dialogue. What emerges is a joyful meditation on our century.
Stepping into this space-time, at once pared-down and eclectic, visitors are plunged into Lepiez’s cobbled-together memory. Amid a muffled racket, the homemade automatons move tirelessly and interact nonchalantly with various everyday objects, magnifying their banality. Cardboard, hot glue, masking tape: this whole lovely jumble seems to hang by a thread, and yet it does not. Every detail, present in abundance, has been carefully thought out and carried out in a grand, organized madness. Between reminiscences of an analog life and the omnipresence of the digital, Lepiez recreates the glitch and plays in the breach. Nostalgic for an era that fell between the cracks, she saturates the tones, multiplies symbols and relics, and blurs the trail. And so high heels, doll arms, Sharpie tattoos, a porcelain Pierrot and pastel airbrush replay on a loop the myth of teenage turmoil, against a backdrop of atonal music and a shopping-mall fountain. A poetry that has nothing to envy the profane charm of bar-bathroom graffiti.
All around, giant woven works reign over the space, which also presents an edit of performative videos showing the artist perched on makeshift pedestals, methodically repeating some of the obscure gestures performed by her automatons, trying to grasp them by deconstructing them in a hypnotic “devolutive” dance. Brought back to a primitive human form, the practitioner in turn becomes the metaphorical embodiment of the no wave movement that inhabits her, irony included. In this bewildering collage mixing image, movement, sound and grunge and popular iconography, Marie-Claude Lepiez celebrates the absurd and excess in a bric-a-brac guise. With her own gently rebellious nonchalance, undisciplined but always tender, she fights back, hams it up, refuses virtuosity, breaks the system, even going so far as to break herself to combat mindlessness and try to escape emptiness.
– Text by Kristina Gauthier-Landry
About the artist
Marie-Claude Lepiez lives and works in Montréal. She holds an MFA from Concordia University (2021). Her career has led her to present solo exhibitions in May 2025 at the artist-run centre L’Œil de Poisson in Quebec City, in Rimouski (Caravansérail 2021) and in Rouyn-Noranda (L’Écart 2019), as well as elsewhere in Quebec in various group exhibition contexts.
She has also completed several artist residencies in Canada and Europe, notably at Est-Nord-Est, in Austria and in Norway, where she deepened her practice in a variety of research-creation environments.
Marie-Claude is also part of Collectif Sourire, alongside puppeteer Céline Chevrier. She has been supported on several occasions by the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
About the author
Born in Natashquan before the arrival of Route 138, Kristina Gauthier-Landry works on memory and emancipation. Revealed in 2018 by the Prix de la création Radio-Canada, she published Et arrivées au bout nous prendrons racine (La Peuplade) in 2020, a first chiaroscuro poetry collection rooted in maritime nostalgia. A second poetry book, Kaléidoscope mon cœur, followed in 2022 from Éditions du Boréal. Written for teenagers and dealing with anxiety, the collection allowed her to work in cultural mediation with a view to making literature more accessible. Continuing to explore the duality of filiation and emancipation, she published the novel Le don (La Peuplade) in 2024. Winner of the Prix Myriam-Caron and a finalist for the Prix Aznavour, this intergenerational feminist story opened the doors to various events and festivals in Quebec and Europe. In 2025, she received the Jean-Marie Poupart grant for a novel project on the transmission of male violence in working-class communities, to be published in 2027.
