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.
STRANGE MOODS AND DISSONANT FEELINGS / Work of the dancer
2017
Video installation: performance, projection, video delay
42 minutes
“I’m a dancer. When I trained to be a dancer, I was taught to be malleable, flexible, available, strong and to learn the movements of others as quickly as I possibly could. I was essentially training to be a manual labourer.” - Sarah Wendt
This piece is both a finished work and an evolving creative process. It draws from texts such as “In praise of the dancing body” by Sylvia Federici, and Sara Wookey’s “Disappearing Acts & Resurfacing Subjects: Concerns of (a) Dance Artist(s)”. It functions on two axes: personal experiences working as a dancer and choreographer in collaboration with visual artists; secondly, a response to how dance and dancers often exist on the margins of art museum culture. Are dancers' bodies and physical practices resources? Material?
The installation sets up choreography as a means to coalesce sculpture and movement. On a small stage, a closed-circuit video camera is filming the projection of its own video signal with a delay. Between the camera and the projection, a lecture and choreography take place. Archived choreographic material results in a mise-en-abyme of the performative/compositional process. Becoming a visual echo, these elements interrogate the following question: What is the value of human energy (in relation to material cost, labour, artistic legacy, and authorship)?
Festivals/Conferences:
Flotilla, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, P.E.I. (Canada), 2017. Curated by Elise Anne LaPlante, John Murchie, Mary MacDonald, Michael Eddy, Zachary Gough and Raven Davis.
Mois Multi, Complexe Méduse, Quebec City, Quebec, (Canada). Curated by Ariane Plante.
On Air. VIVA ART ACTION! at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Quebec, (Canada), 2018. Curated by Viva Art Action!
OFFTA festival d’arts vivants, Wilder Building, Montréal, Quebec, (Canada), 2018.
“The narration and the video offer themselves as a prelude, a foray into the reflection that precedes the creative act. They shed light on the questions that artists ask themselves about the cohabitation of their respective languages, visual and performative, in particular in the use of choreography as a form of sculpture and of video as a tool to overcome the limits of temporality and ordinary vision.”
Esse 94 - Labour, 2018
Author: Marie-Pier Bocquet
performance at VIVA ART ACTION!, Centre Canadien d'Architecture.
photo: Martinel_CCAonAir
Excerpt from performance (40 min duration) at Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, September, 2017. Event: Flotilla
Installation mode: Mois Multi, Quebec City, Quebec (Canada), 2018.