Au Bain St-Michel (5300 rue Saint-Dominique, Montréal)

La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse is pleased to join the VIVA! ART ACTION festival for its third edition and offers a bold programming, strong and original.

SCHEDULE

Friday, October 7, 8pm

Yurie Ido (JPN / DEU)

Rachel Echenberg (QC)

Saturday, October 8, 5 pm

Noemi McComber (QC), 8 pm

Alice de Visscher (BEL)

5 to 8 October

from 14h to 16h at La Centrale:

Marie-Claude Bouthillier

(Reservation required at La Centrale)

MARIE-CLAUDE BOUTHILLIER (QC)
Vie d’artiste

October 5 to 8, 2-4pm (La Centrale)
Due to limited space reservation is required.
We thank you for taking your appointment in person at La Centrale (info: 514.871.0268).
Lenght: 15 minutes / individual meeting

Throughout the VIVA ! ART ACTION performance event, I invite the visitor to enter the heart of the pictorial environment La bonne aventure to take part in a ritual in which I will perform an action similar to a tarot reading. A set of 56 self-edited cards will be used representing the recurring themes of the myth of the artist as it is presented in literature. Ten cards are drawn at random and arranged in a traditional configuration. I then give my interpretation of the cards meanings for the visitor, telling the story of an artist's destiny. As the game consists of clichés, the reading's result will strangely be in line with our expectations of what constitutes an artist's life. Each reading is archived and subsequently used to write short stories.

BIO: Since the end of the 80’s, Marie-Claude Bouthillier’s work has regularly been seen in solo and group exhibitions in both Quebec and abroad. Her pieces have been selected as part of collective projects in institutions such as the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. She presented Apparitions, a solo exhibition, at Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark in spring 2008. In 2010, Dans le ventre de la baleine, was exhibited at Optica. She is presenting La Bonne aventure at La Centrale in 2011 and her work will be shown at Galerie de l’UQÀM in 2012 in the exhibition Loin des yeux près du corps, curated by Thérèse St-Gelais. She holds a Masters degree from Université du Québec à Montréal. Marie-Claude Bouthillier lives and works in Montréal.

The artist would like to thank: Atelier Clark and the Canada Council for the Arts.


RACHEL ECHENBERG (QC)
Practicing Positivity

Friday, October 7, 8pm (Bain St-Michel)

Rachel Echenberg’s collage of actions explicitly set up expectations that quickly get broken. By playing with the speed and focus of the actions, Practicing Positivity is a performance that attempts to portray the slippage from image to experience.

BIO: Rachel Echenberg (b.1970, Montreal, Quebec) works primarily in performance and video art to highlight vulnerable, intimate and uncontrollable relationships. Since 1992 her work has been exhibited, performed and screened throughout Canada as well as internationally in Chile, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States. Many of her videos are available through Vidéographe Distribution in Montreal. Echenberg holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada (1993) and an MA with distinction in Visual Performance from Dartington College of Arts in the UK (2004). Rachel Echenberg currently teaches in the Fine Arts Department of Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec.


YURIE IDO (JPN/DEU)
DEAD

Friday, October 7, 8pm (Bain St-Michel)

“Death is one of the greatest fictions in life. Even if death in books or movies appears unusual and strange/synonymes?, it is also captivating. It seems that people try to reflect on death through words.” In her work, the artist Yurie Ido shares her thoughts about death through a visual experience. The workDead is composed of music, video and performance, in which the artist's body and movements are incorporated as a part of the embodied fiction thus creating a dialogue with the viewer without the use of words.

BIO: Yurie Ido (Japan, 1980) studied oil painting and animation at Tama Art University in Tokyo. She moved to Berlin in 2003, where she graduated with an MFA from Udk – Berlin’s University of the Arts – in 2007. While studying at UdK, Ido began making video performances in galleries and theaters around Berlin. In her performances she combines animation, actions and music. Recently she has been performing her work throughout Germany. Yurie Ido will be artist in residence at Turku, Finland in January 2012.

NOÉMI MCCOMBER (QC)
Hoisting the Flag

Saturday, October 8, 5pm (Bain St-Michel)

"A flag must fly uphigh and free (…) To fulfill its function, a flag should dominate its surroundings(1)". In Hoisting the Flag, Noémi McComber will solemnly declare the official government protocol for the use of the Quebec flag in public space. Helped by two assistants, Myriam Jacob-Allard and Sarah Bronsard, the artist will suggest alternative interpretations to the text, through a series of actions that will bring it into question. This performance explores the transgression of established procedures, by operating in the semi-regulated place of art in public space.

BIO: Through drawing, photography, video, performance and urban interventions, Noémi McComber examines how people react to the physical and social constraints they encounter. Considering the implicit rules that regulate social space, she attempts to reformulate the potential space that a person or a group can occupy. The public sphere becomes a playground to experiment with the given limits and allow the emergence of new poetic spaces. Without always succeeding, she attempts to involve the viewer in a world that is familiar, but surprising by the emergence of intrusive elements.

Noémi McComber received her Masters in visual and media arts from Chelsea College of Art in London, UK in 2002. She has since pursued a variety of artistic projects, adopting a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach. She has shown her work in Columbia, Russia, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and Denmark. In 2011, she has presented NewFlags for Old Monuments at DARE-DARE,Acercate mas at Casa Tres Patios in Medellin, Columbia, part of the collective L’araignée, and she is currently having a solo show at Maison des arts de Laval, entitled La peau du bronze. She lives and works in Montreal.

The artist would like to thank: Théo Von Geyer

(1) (Freely Translated by the artist) Ministère des relations avec les citoyens et de l’immigration, Le drapeau national : Historique et protocole d’utilisation, Gouvernement du Québec, 2002, p.14



ALICE DE VISSCHER (BEL)

Saturday, October 8, 8pm (Bain St-Michel)

This performance will be the result of an exploration of space with the use of my body, of interactions between a space's dimension, matter, form, properties and my body. By actions, with or without the use of objects, I attempt in sharing this exploration with the public in a playful, poetic, maybe humorous, maybe provocative way. These actions are assembled in a more or less structured collage fashion.

BIO: Alice De Visscher lives and works in Brussels (Belgium). In her performances, she physically and poetically explores the properties of an object, her body, and space, as well as the the relationships they share. While creating strange images or actions, she seeks to provoke the public’s imagination. Her interest in the exploration of materials (including the material of the body) is used to break down pre-conceived meanings by juxtaposing elements to create new and peculiar associations between everyday life objects and herself. The artist’s works focuses mainly onperformance and video.


Photo credits (top left clockwise): photo Noémi McComber par Janick Rousseau (2011), photo Alice De Visscher par Luis Alvarez (2011), photo Yurie Ido par Satoshi Kinugawa (2010), photo Rachel Echenberg par Marcin Kucewicz (2009).