What We Take With Us – TNG (2012)

We just came back from Calgary where our video installation What We Take With Us is being presented at The New Gallery. The opening was on January 5th and the exhibition will continue until February 4th 2012.  We stayed at the John Snow House which is administrated by TNG.  It is an extraordinary place loaded with history.

Thanks to everyone at TNG: Tim, Jessica, Noel, Kathryn, Su, Volunteers – and all who came out to the opening!  Our talks will be posted online next week.

Our installation is also part of This Is My City Festival, an interdisciplinary festival of art from the margins.

Excerpt from the essay written by Tomas Jonsson:

Recurrent waves of colonialism and globalization have smoothed and prescribed our encounters with places. For the traveler, points of difference, or of distinction, are sought after, perhaps increasingly so, or patronizingly handed over. Monuments, historical sites and natural landmarks are increasingly oriented to ‘the amused eye’, which the traveler can then compare and develop a discourse “for the comparative connoisseurship of places.”

In What We Take With Us, Dugas and LeBlanc explore a complicated, contingent terrain, whose borders extend into and circumvent geographies, both physical and social, ‘here’ and ‘away’. Encompassing individual catalysts, personal experiences, mental and body memories, the resulting landscape can’t be easily anticipated or defined.

The videos mimic the internal ordering and filtering of places. Each series of vignettes display a personal vision, reflecting the difference in interpretation even by two people so closely aligned. They follow in Dugas and LeBlanc’s collaborative approach in their production and presentation, but in this case the associations are left to chance due to an unsynched running time. The result is a constantly shifting dialogue between the videos, with unknown permutations and combinations. 

Ce qu’on emporte avec nous, What We Take With Us (2010)

Valerie LeBlanc et moi avons terminé notre nouveau projet : Ce qu’on emporte avec nous, une installation vidéo à deux canaux examinant différents aspects de la présence et de la mémoire.  Une première exposition aura lieu à la Galerie E DANS L’A au mois de janvier 2011.  Pour plus d’information :http://whatwetakewithus.wordpress.com/

Valerie LeBlanc and myself have just finished our new project: What We Take With Us, a two channel video installation exploring different aspects of memory and presence.  A first exhibition is scheduled at the E DANS L’A Gallery in January 2011.  For more information: http://whatwetakewithus.wordpress.com/