du littoral – works out of context

Artist’s Statement

Du littorale (a walk through B)

337th Cantos for Gilles Deleuze

My initial field work with the Shorelines Project was the St. Jean Baptiste day hike between Cap St. George and Mainland and I was struck by the work involved in marking this, now seldom used, trail. Historically, it was the only route between these two communities. This impression followed me throughout my subsequent visits to the Port au Port peninsula. The shoreline is a path, a space of transition from being to coming-to-being [Massumi].

Drawing inspiration from Henri Bergson, who envisioned embodiment through the image in “Matière et mémoire” and “L’évolution créatrice”; I am interested in how we identify with the image in a process that is more about what we choose to disregard than what we choose to bring to our seeing. The trail and its markings is similarly about guiding the traveller by taking attention away from the forest so focus can be brought to the track to be followed.

Memory is an imprecise tool. Imagination is much more precise, but not so much a tool for many. The work retraces the spaces between experience, memory and thought. The images flow between Agathuna, Boswarlos, Cap St. George and points in between. They are a conflation of experiences mirroring the way memory brings elements together in a work of elegant efficiency. The installation suggests intersection, expansion and contraction, mimicking the efficiency of consciousness and unconsciousness at processing experiential data.

“Du littorale” is a document of a series of mouvances1; they are memories in the wider sense and they are a philosophical musing on place, time and being. We move through spaces/places and they move through us, no place/space is unmediated. Each image is a moment; all these moments are gathered and reflected upon in a space of coming-to-being [Massumi] as reflected in the water lapping the pebbles on the beach.

Pierre N. LeBlanc for the Commission GEDEON Commission, February 24th, 2010

 

Though it is obvious that care and craft are part of the making of work, I do not find that simply looking at the images conveys the affect desired for the work. It is meant to exist in a space where the human scale is brought to the pieces that are themselves using scale to create an event.

The images are all printed on synthetic surfaces: vinyl, tyvek, polyethylene film. They have a smell that contradicts the images. The point being that the “originality” of experience is questioned along side the “déjà-vu” of travelling through the landscape as a tourist.

1 LeBlanc, G. (1986). Lieux Transitoires, Michel Henri Éditeur

Bergson, H. (1941). L’évolution créatrice, 9e edition, P.U.F. Quadrige, 2001

Bergson, H. (1939). Matière et mémoire, 7e edition, P.U.F. Quadrige, 2001

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual, Duke University Press

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