Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux share an art practice that takes form in sculpture, media art, installation and dance. Their collaborative methodology seeks to imbue their projects with strange forms of temporality and heightened articulations of labour to draw forward an environment that melds science fiction to reality.
They live and work as uninvited guests on the traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Mohawk and St. Lawrence Iroquoian inTiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.
Ectoplasmic studies
2021 - 2023
Installation: one-channel video projection, photo assemblage, buckwheat husks, ping pong balls, plywood, glue, fabric, plastic, mirror, plaster, steel, micro-glass beads, cardboard, foam
An installation and video of auto-generative forms that gathers our collaboration with sculptural objects, choreography + improvisation.
A dialogue that examines transfers of energy and movement into solid forms. Our measure is Ectoplasm (from the Greek ektos, meaning "outside", and plasma, meaning "something formed or moulded”). Inside a visual language and space we discover a metaphor for our process of transformation. Our performance becomes a sculpture - a sort of permanent (non-permanent) state.
Exhibitions :
Études ectoplasmiques at Galerie l'Écart. Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, (Canada) 2023.
Récits Naturels, group show curated by Aseman Sabet at the Musée d’Art Contemporaine des Laurentides. St. Jerome, Quebec, (Canada), 2021.
Supported by: Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
Photos of exhibition L’Écart: Wendt+Dufaux.
Photos of exhibition MACLAU: Lucien Lisabelle (except image 1: Wendt+Dufaux)
Partial views, exhibition at Galerie L'Écart, 2023.
Tactile visit of the exhibition at L'Écart.
With the collaboration of l'Association des Personnes Handicapées Visuelles Abitibi-Témiscamingue (APHV-AT)
Video HD + sound. Duration 04:16
Partial views, at Musée d'Art Contemporain des Laurentides, 2021.
Excerpt of Didier Morelli's review of the exhibitions Récits naturels in Vie des Art, Sept 2021.
...Taking up an important part of the exhibition space, Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux's Études ectoplasmiques is partly composed of an evolutionary-like wall diagram with sculptures, videos, and matrix of lines interconnecting all of its adjacent parts. The installation echoes some of the previous themes on view throughout Natural Stories, including the categorization, collection, and public display of nature meant for mass consumption or en. tertainment. Verging on science fiction, the wall work deploys a sculptural vocabulary of organic structures and shapes, mirrors and refractory surfaces, and short dynamic explanatory videos on small imbedded monitors meant to convey action, movement, and nature's force at work. A single channel video projected in a darkened back room accompanies the installation. The film mixes archival footage of various viscous, oozing, and emerging ectoplasms with newly created performative sequences by the artists, echoing the explosion of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) home videos that have recently taken over online video streaming platforms. Completely mesmerizing, oddly satisfying, and deeply visceral, Études ectoplasmiques is both playful and critically incisive in its multisensory depictions of the chemical, elastic, and bulbous transformation of the inorganic and organic substances that surround us
