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For their first presentation in Montreal as a duo, the Ville Saguenay artists Carl Bouchard and Martin Dufrasne, offer the installaction – an installation and performance actions – Il est trop tard maintenant! … a work reflecting on the responsibilities and autonomy of beings in relationship to the other, and on the notion of consent as openness to games of power.
Starting with the idea of the couple as a relationship structure composed of distinct entities, Bouchard and Dufrasne concern themselves with the dynamic between individuals; their mechanisms, their possibilities and their limits, whether the ties be romantic, friendly, racial, social or otherwise. This work constructs itself, write Bouchard and Dufrasne, “as a perverse structure offering a twisted connection between actor/spectator, object/subject, attraction/repulsion. |
It operates via a game of seduction and frustration, where, alternately, the spectator finds his control, laxity and abstinence tested.”
Using the device of the oxymoron to illustrate what is present in all relationships, occasionally without our knowing, or against our will, the artists position themselves as – alternately – executioner and victim, manipulator and manipulated. Il est trop tard maintenant! shows clearly that all games of influence, power, takeover, force, and manipulation are played by two – implying here the relationship between artist and public. Moreover, this illustration of such strongly unequal connections questions our capacity for abandon, implication, voluntary blindness, for loyalty and conscious activity and consent.
NdeB. translated by PduB.
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Il est trop tard maintenant! (installation detail), 2004
© Carl Bouchard and Martin Dufrasne, 2003. Photo : A. B.
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Carl Bouchard and Martin Dufrasne live in Ville Saguenay. They are co-founders (with about ten other artists) of the Ateliers TouTTout. They have pursued a collective practice parallel to their individual work since 1998. Among their jointly realized projects, one should mention BusY (1999) and SUONS (1999). Bouchard and Dufrasne have also taken part in numerous group shows throughout Quebec and in Colombia. In the spring of 2004, their work will be shown at Dazibao (Montreal) in the exhibition La lumiere comme surmoi.
The artists would like to thank their mothers, Francois Nadeau, Le Bistrot des Anges, Patrice Duchesne, Kay Arsenault, Paul Cimon, Rodrique Villeneuve, L’Atelier d’estampe Sagamie and the team at CLARK.
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