Opening, Friday, September 7, 6PM

Family Saturdays: September 15 and October 20

“It’s all life until death”

Under the Cave of Winds

Opening, Friday, September 7 - 6PM

Family Saturdays: September 15 and October 20

In her poetry and in essays of an often fictionalized autobiographical nature, Maryse Larivière puts her own voice on the line by going beyond oppositions between affective lived experience and the symbolic construction of sexual difference. Under the guise of research in art history, Larivière also produces analyses of artistic practices of the 1970s-among them Joyce Wieland-that were contemporary with the emergence of women's writing in the literary field. The epistolary novel Orgazing, one component of her installation at OPTICA, Under the Cave of Winds, continues with her own practice of assembling referential fragments in a mix of stylistic modes (poetry, theory, autobiography). The action is set on Staffa Island, Scotland. From her cell at the top of Fingal’s Cave, the narrator writes letters to her lover, weaving an amorous discourse that places the auditory pleasures of language before recognition of one’s desire by the “other.” As readers, we adopt the role of the hypothetical—and apparently male—subject addressed by the author, while remaining a third party, outside the transference relationship. Yet the exhibition encourages transgressive gestures in the literary space by way of an intentionally inadequate “adaptation” of the book. Thus, a 16-mm film strings together narrative fragments drawn from a breakdown of this “source text.” The artist plays the figure of the captive author, though she avoids showing her face, while the craggy landscape and prison architecture make surreptitious appearances. Saturating the cinematic apparatus, the scene of the writing, and the space in which we are strolling, the sculptures act as hinges or pivots. Some have a dissimulative function, like the rock that hides the film projector and thus emits a single beam of light, while the back of the screen becomes a load-bearing structure for an absent parrot. Yet these apparently motionless markers also change shape during our visit. In the parallax, their configuration alludes at once to the translation process Larivière undertook in composing Orgazing (English not being her mother tongue) and to the fluid movements of the character’s psyche as she invents her own language, made up as much of words uttered as of air exhaled.

Public reading of the book Orgazing at OPTICA

Friday, September 7 - 7PM
Maryse Larivière, Orgazing, Calgary, Untitled Art Society, 2017, 64p.
Epistolary novella, prose and poetry

Trailing Edge / Leading Edge

Opening, Saturday, November 10 - 3PM to 6PM

Family Saturdays: November 17 and December 15

Geneviève Chevalier’s Trailing Edge / Leading Edge, which takes the form of a two-channel video installation accompanied by an artist’s book, deals with the predicament of northern seabirds in an era of climate change. The video juxtaposes images taken from the exploration of various sites and seabird colonies throughout Scotland and Québec, interspersed with interviews with British seabird researcher emeritus Sarah Wanless and Québec biologist and research chair in arctic biodiversity Dominique Berteaux. Picking up from the video, the artist’s book explores avenues of reflection and offers the rudiments of an answer.

Opening, Saturday, November 10 - 3PM to 6PM

Family Saturdays: November 17 and December 15

In the exhibition Le Prisme, Virginie Laganière proposes a reflection on the phenomena of the Italian seaside summer camps erected during the Fascist era on a backdrop of political indoctrination. First interested in the sociopolitical ramifications of this slice of history, Laganière pays special attention to these exceptional, futurist-inspired architectural explorations, which have drawn the interest of modernism enthusiasts worldwide. In the gallery, she experiments with on-site space in order to build small architectural modules that can house a video diptych.