Fabienne Lasserre: Les Approches and Feeling of Dread
October 29–November 28, 2015
Opening: Wednesday, October 28, 6–9pm
Parisian Laundry
3550 St-Antoine West
Montreal, Quebec
Canada, H4C 1A9
www.parisianlaundry.com
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Fabienne Lasserre: Les Approches
In her first solo exhibition at Parisian Laundry, Brooklyn-based artist Fabienne Lasserre continues her rigorous exploration of material, form, space and agency. Though her large-scale sculptures certainly perform their own autonomy as coherent and demarcated objects, this autonomy is nevertheless precarious. While the use of colour is one strategy employed to reiterate the difference between surfaces and artworks, it also creates repetition and essentially asserts each artwork’s contingency upon its others, its surroundings and the viewer. A sculpture may obscure another or, through a hole, frame it, depending on the position of the spectator. In this vein, Lasserre picks up on the history of Minimalism. That being said, her body of work ultimately challenges such easy classifications.
Lasserre’s sculptures are in some ways products of chance, as the artist molds, stretches and pulls materials according to her impulses. Yet these materials oftentimes push back defiantly, producing artworks that negotiate a space between intention and end. Furthermore, universalized categories such as matter, sexuality and biology are discernable, but in ways that render them nearly unrecognizable. Lasserre is more interested in the excluded area between accepted taxonomies, the remainder that is left forgotten in economies of information. Her approach is grounded in certain areas of feminist theory, undoing naturalized modes of order and the power dynamics implicit thereof.
Fabienne Lasserre holds a BA in Fine Arts from Concordia University (Montreal) and an MA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (New York). She has exhibited widely in the United States and Canada, including solo exhibtions in New York and Miami, as well as in Toronto, Montreal and Québec City. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Oaxaca, Mexico, Santiago, Chile, Berlin, London and Kassel, Germany. Recent exhibitions include C.Ar.D. in cittàat at the Palazzo Costa Trettenero (Piacenza, Italy), Beyond the End at the Kadist Foundation (Paris), and Outside the Lines at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (TX).
Feeling of Dread
Ida Badal, Jesse Chapman, Nathan Ellefson, Rochelle Goldberg, Miljohn Ruperto & Ulrik Heltoft, Alina Tenser, Eric Veit, Andrew Norman Wilson
Curated by Woobie Bogus and John-Elio Reitman
In Feeling of Dread, the works of nine artists come together to imagine a non-partisan, post-apocalyptic perspective—or in part, the impacts of a post-human bunker. Inside the space is a preserved archive, organic and fabricated after escaping the whatever/whichever, and actively evolving and adjusting to the environment. Plants mutate and prosper, transcending subservient roles as food and decor. Furniture objects, appliances, architecture and fixtures develop desire and ignore their convenient purposes. The room itself is living and dying, blissfully unaware of how it got there and what it might be expected to do.
The exhibition finds its footing in the differences between science fiction and fantasy; projections of the future and make-believe from another reality. Feeling of Dread is a flexible approach to the science fiction reality of an object in a room, the fantasy of an idea that can prove anything, and the opportunity to understand these works as both genres.