Stone Stationery
Since the 1980s, the art world has become increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized. Artists and cultural workers are increasingly subject to an array of administrative requirements. Workshops and self-managed production and dissemination spaces are giving way to office spaces limited to paperwork and screen surfaces on which perpetual cycles of recommencement take place: receipt and feedback of e-mails, fund-raising, grant and report writing, updating of communicative devices, accumulation of documents, and so on. Empirical know-how, meanwhile, is being replaced by technical advances such as digitization, modeling and 3D printing. Do the professions of artist and art worker now boil down to an overload of overly concrete, immediate, repetitive, methodical and disembodied acts? Is creative power now influenced by administrative authority?
For his exhibition Stone Stationery, Louis-Charles Dionne draws inspiration from this excessive context of bureaucratization, proposing a formal and material lexicon sculpted in slate, marble and quartz. Through the lens of sculptural archaeology, the artist telescopes temporalities. We journey from the buried petroglyphs of the Neolithic to the technological advances of today’s stone sculpture. Through this corpus, he combines the institutional essence of various stationery items with the heritage of nearly 30,000 years of sculptural practice. The modeled objects are representations of office supplies made of paper, such as a binder or notebook. He recreates them in the age-old material of rock, through ambitious, painstaking and meticulous treatments. The objects are hybrids, a combination of primitive and contemporary forms. Dionne engages in a Sisyphean process of exploration and experimentation. In this sense, the pieces are removed from the productivist logic which has now become the norm.
The layout of the exhibition has nothing in common with a rupestral site. The two-tridimensional works are arranged in an orderly fashion. They are arranged – categorized – on vertical files found here and there or taken directly from CIRCA’s office. Beyond the aesthetic experience of the ready-made, Dionne permutes his sculptures into plinths-artworks – with constituents inherent to the notion of pedestal. The furniture emphasizes the integration and hybridization of notebooks, binders and briefcases fashioned from different varieties of slate or marble. The reproductions become, by addition, a kind of counter-monument to our bureaucratic age.
This ensemble is complemented by a series of stationery items: Cahiers Canada engraved on slate slabs, files chiselled from pieces of quartz and dividers carved from marble. The combinations are arranged on the gallery walls in grids that refer to the organization of our computer screens, with all their files stored in virtual folders. The most impressive work in the corpus consists of 52 weekly time cards. The daily timelines, etched into the veins of the marble, demonstrate the controlling effect that the punch clock has on our over-calculated daily lives. Our occupations as art workers are thus linked to the hierarchical verticality of stone monuments and, in particular, the legacy of archaic sculptural ideals.
Louis-Charles Dionne’s gestural reliefs are a different reflection of today’s reality, like strata of history inscribed on stone and in the earth. Tomorrow, these vestiges may be found and bear witness to a time when management has replaced the spontaneity of creation.
-Text by Jean-Michel Quirion
Artist biography
Louis-Charles Dionne is a sculptor, teacher and researcher based in Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Rouville. He completed a bachelor’s degree in sculpture and art history at Concordia University, a master’s degree in visual arts at NSCAD University, and a DESS in higher education pedagogy at UQÀM. He is currently a doctoral student at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, and teaches at NSCAD University and Concordia University. His work has been shown across Canada, in Italy, France and Germany, and can be found in several collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank, the Nova Scotia Art Bank, the Art Volte collection and several private collections. His practice has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Arts Nova Scotia, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.
Author Biography
Jean-Michel Quirion holds a master’s degree in museology from the Université du Québec en Outaouais (2020), and is currently a doctoral candidate in museology at the same university. A cultural worker for some ten years, he is Co-General Manager – Programming at Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK in Montreal. As an author, he is a regular contributor to specialized magazines such as Ciel variable, ESPACE art actuel, Esse arts + opinions, Inter art actuel and Vie des arts. His curatorial projects have been shown at Galerie UQO (2018) and AXENÉO7 (2023) in Gatineau, Carleton University Art Gallery (2022) in Ottawa, DRAC – Art actuel Drummondville (2022) and L’Œil de Poisson (2022) in Quebec City. He is also a member of the CIÉCO research and reflection group.
