Celia Perrin Sidarous: Les figures
Contingent Matter
January 14–February 13, 2016
Opening: Wednesday, January 13, 6–8pm
Parisian Laundry
3550 St-Antoine West
Montreal, Quebec
Canada, H4C 1A9
www.parisianlaundry.com
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Celia Perrin Sidarous: Les figures
In her first solo exhibition at Parisian Laundry, Celia Perrin Sidarous presents a selection of photographs engaging with the enigmatic lives of objects through processes of collection and display, and the mechanisms of time and memory. Significant to Perrin Sidarous’ practice is the assemblage. Her images are the sites of dynamic juxtapositions and discrete repetitions; spaces where a variety of objects are arranged in a logic that at once signals inwards as well as pulsates out associatively.
In certain ways, the items Perrin Sidarous pictures perform as points of entry into various areas throughout her entire body of work, a network of inconspicuous portals with no discernable ends. A mirror in one image may lead the viewer to a number of other photographs via the power of association. These unsystematic, irregular reiterations are further externalized to the gallery, particularly in the shape of sculptural forms intervening within physical space, ultimately mediating its relationship with image. In other words, in Perrin Sidarous’ installations, images are treated as possessing a spatial dimension and physical space is conceived of virtually, as image.
Moreover, the artist also complicates conventional understandings of the image’s relationship to time. Fittingly, ruins continually make appearances in her work. Just as these fragments of the past are layered in bits and pieces of history, so too are Perrin Sidarous’ photographs constructed through the superimposition of separate, often unidentifiable temporalities. This treatment of time essentially undermines any straightforward account because the very act of looking is acknowledged as historically specific and therefore unstable.
Thus Perrin Sidarous’ practice is implicitly shrouded in different forms of viewership. This diversity of gazes affirms what the tradition of still life—a tradition that Perrin Sidarous implicates—has throughout its history been predicated on: the complex affective ties between subjects and objects.
Perrin Sidarous completed an MFA at Concordia University, with a concentration in photography. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina, Saskatchewan), the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montreal), the Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta), FOFA Gallery (Montreal) and VU (Quebec). In 2015 Perrin Sidarous was selected as an invited artist in residence at the Darling Foundry (Montreal). Her works are part of important corporate and private collections, as well as institutional collections such as the Art Gallery of Ontario. Perrin Sidarous presented a solo exhibition, curated by Peta Rake and Shauna Thompson, at the Esker Foundation (Calgary, Alberta) titled Interiors, Other Chambers in September 2015.
Celia Perrin Sidarous wishes to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its financial support.
David Armstrong Six, Travis Boyer, Luc Paradis, Letha Wilson: Contingent Matter
Parisian Laundry is delighted to present Contingent Matter, an exhibition concentrating on material dualities and contradictions and featuring the artwork of David Armstrong Six (Montreal), Travis Boyer (New York), Luc Paradis (Montreal) and Letha Wilson (New York). Though in some ways these artists may have dissimilar practices—each working in their own distinct media—what is common to all is a questioning of the material limits of medium itself. Therefore the pieces featured in Contingent Matter avoid easy categorization, oscillating in between conventional classifications of art.
This unwillingness to identify with any one medium is intimately related with a form of material agency. For the division of material (and media) has always been the subject of deeply entrenched values and hierarchies. By challenging typical material restrictions, the artists in Contingent Matter also challenge the hierarchical structures concealed within these restrictions.
Nevertheless, the artworks exhibited are also wholly dependent on the categories they destabilize. The symbols of tradition are never totally undermined, but fundamentally inform the turns against and away from them. Thus Contingent Matter occupies an uncertain territory between the traditional and the transgressive. Moreover the exhibition engages with the ways in which an avant-garde may necessitate the traditions it dismantles.
