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.

Quelque part dans l’inachevé 

2019

Installation: two-channel video projection, photography, glass, honey, moss, fabric, vinyl, plexiglass, plywood, glue, plaster, metal

An oneiric fiction that forges video, sound, motion and sculpture into a swirl of pop-apocalyptic imagery.

In this installative configuration the diverse elements come together to generate a destabilizing view. On a table are presented closed vases resembling laboratory flasks in which honey flows slowly like an hourglass. A two-channel video projection captures the eye with a pop-apocalyptic scenario amongst sound instruments, mirrors and plexiglass-framed “artefacts”. The video footage shot in Newfoundland’s Tablelands, provides an otherworldly aura. The overall presentation is somewhere between a quasi science fiction landsite, or perhaps, a re-examined archaeological past; either way, the overall effect lands the viewer in a charged, oneiric entourage.

Exhibitions:
Axenéo7, Gatineau, Quebec, (Canada), 2019, Curated by Jean-Michel Quirion

Performance: October 25th, 2019, Axenéo7 as part of PERF performance festival

Supported by: A residency at Axenéo7, Gatineau, Quebec (Canada); Canada Council for the Arts; Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec

Press (FR):

“With “Quelque part dans l'inachevé”, Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux have created an alternate space-time where the matter of things of the world reveals its essential alchemy.” 

Nathalie Bachand, Ciel Variable Magazine, 2020

Press (FR):

"Through some of these fragments, the work (... ) develops an original and imaginative eco-futurist vision, as well as a post-humanist reflection on our relationship to the environment and to technology."

Anna Brunette, Espace Art Actuel, 2019

Exhibition view

Exhibition text by Jean-Michel Quirion: 

Through their installation “Quelque part dans l’inachevé,” Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux appropriate that eponymous Rainer Maria Rilke quote in order to define their work as being in continuous reinvention; without conceptual or material limits, the creative process has no end. Wendt’s and Dufaux’s respective practices interweave to create a multisensory, intuitive and, moreover, moving mixture. The duo negotiates with temporality while the process of creation, representation, and reception are completely torn apart in perpetuity. The finality of the exhibition is no less discovered in its elaboration as it is also directly experienced; the proposals within, dwell as much on their own ruin as they suggest potential futures. After a performative and progressive exploration, the artists evoke all the possibilities of the incomplete: of the (un)finished (“l’inachevé”). Through the art of movement, they question the shared experiences of the post-human condition through (inter)actions applied to various constructed protean objects. This “somewhere” (“quelque part”) — the space inside the gallery — is impalpable, elusive, and unstable. Wendt’s + Dufaux’s contributions lead to the creation of illusions, of realities otherwise inaccessible — and of allusive and fictitious aspirations. Immersive and contemplative through the variations in its scenery, the installation transposes its visitors into someplace else; a pop-apocalyptic universe. The senses of the viewer become captivated by the sensory characteristics of these objects. Visitors therefore become at once utopians and survivalists, and participate then and there in a colourful mise-en-scène complicated by photographic and filmed images, pictorial and sculptural objects, which act to measure spatiotemporal reverberations. The performance, pre-rendered by Wendt and pre-recorded by Dufaux on the shores of Newfoundland last year, are twice over projected in the gallery, in two sequences of alternating order. Through a series of interventions, Sarah Wendt, without pretense, surveys the territory and guides the visitors into these arid lands. A landscape of frenetic sounds, incorporating the singular resonance of the French horn, intensifies the (in)actions the artist makes towards every one of these dreamlike objects.

For Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux, “l’inachevé” is a methodology that leads right into an infinite “quelque part”.

Exhibition views

details

Honey hourglasses

Using Format