Escalona De Abreu
✤ Curaduría / curation / commissariat
✽ Arte / artwork / œuvre
✣ Escritos / writing / écriture
Bio
Press
Contact:
mandarinaesc at gmail . com
Escalona De Abreu
✤ Curaduría / curation / commissariat
✽ Arte / artwork / œuvre
✣ Escritos / writing / écriture
Bio
Press
Contact:
mandarinaesc at gmail . com
pulp_work-afk.doc
Artiste | artist | artista: Chloë p.f. Lalonde
Commissaire | curator | curadora: María Andreína Escalona De Abreu
Acknowledgements: thanks to the co-directors of Céline Bureau: Hugo Dufour and Elise Boudreau Graham, mediator and weaver: Hannah Ferguson, technician and sustainability coordinator: Josh Jensen, photographer: Alexandra Dumais, writer: Louise Campion, and our collaborators: CUCCR, Atelier Retailles and the FOFA Gallery for their support and care throughout and beyond this project.
Documentación de la exposición | exhibition’s documentation | documentation de l’exposition
Exhibition text:
What are the material traces of our labour? As artists, curators, art administrators, educators, writers, papermakers, weavers, and laborers we collaborate to inhabit Céline Bureau with work-in-progress, artworks, gestures, our time and more labour. As a continuation of the exhibition paper_work.doc presented at the FOFA Gallery this summer, which brought together artists working at the intersection of papermaking, sustainability, relational practices, and labour, we (re)think and expose our pulp, our work and our docs.
pulp
An undefined mass of material, in a wet, soft, shapeless state. See a pile of yarn scraps, shapeless blue fluff, a pile of seaweed used to give shape to a morphing soft sculpture, patches of handwoven fabric for future unidentified graphemes creating with, for and from our natural surroundings. We invite these materials to inhabit the garage as a way to embrace the creative process with all its mistakes, unexpected outcomes, and slow pace.
_work
An open invitation to continue developing a large artistic and research practice encompassing paperwork, artworks, craftwork, slow_work, and work_work. The pieces in the space result from discarded paperwork and string from past projects, from hiking in nature and weaving at the beach, from conversations in vernissages and experimenting in the garage, from a thesis in Vienna and many hours on the loom; they are new surfaces to continue to work; embodying the lived tension between making artwork and working in the arts. As cultural workers, we see the term holding space for all forms of labour related to creation and that sustaining such creation is to sustain good relations to ourselves, to each other, and to nature.
-afk.doc
A time and space dedicated for the weaver to work away-from-keyboard. A nod to a previous site-specific installation and performance, we weave canvases for soft sculptures and make paper out of scraps. The desk is now a swinging branch loom and the keyboard a shuttle of thread, the institution and fast-paced environment is now a garage — its corners, walls, ceiling, lamps, spiral staircase, and floors become a playground, a learning and teaching opportunity to materialize and make visible the labour behind art-making and exhibition-making.
Text by Chloë p.f. Lalonde and María Andreína Escalona De Abreu
Texte d'exposition:
Quelles sont les traces matérielles de notre travail ? En tant qu'artistes, commissaires, travailleur.euses culturel.les, éducateur.trices, écrivain.nes, papetier.ères, tisserand.es et travailleur.euses, nous collaborons pour occuper Céline Bureau avec des projets en cours, des œuvres d'art, des gestes, notre temps et encore plus de travail. Comme suite à l'exposition paper_work.doc présentée à la Galerie FOFA cet été, qui réunissait des artistes travaillant à l'intersection de la fabrication du papier, de la durabilité, des pratiques relationnelles et du travail, nous (re)pensons et exposons notre pulpe, notre travail et nos documents.
pulpe
Une masse indéfinie de matériaux, en état humide, mou et sans forme. Une pile de bouts de fil, du fluff bleu informe, une pile d'algues utilisée pour donner forme à une sculpture souple, des pièces de toile tissée à la main pour de futurs graphèmes non identifiés, le tout créé avec, pour et à partir de notre environnement naturel. Nous invitons ces matériaux à habiter le garage comme un moyen de faire place au processus créatif avec toutes ses erreurs, ses résultats inattendus et son rythme lent.
_travail
Une invitation ouverte à continuer à développer une large pratique artistique et de recherche englobant la paperasserie, les œuvres d'art, l'artisanat, le slow_work, et le work_work. Les pièces dans l'espace résultent de papiers jetés et de fils de projets passés, de randonnées dans la nature et de tissages au bord de la plage, de conversations dans des vernissages et d'expérimentations dans le garage, d'une thèse à Vienne et de nombreuses heures sur le métier à tisser ; ce sont de nouvelles surfaces pour continuer à travailler ; elles incarnent la tension vécue entre la création d'œuvres d'art et le travail dans les arts. En tant que travailleur.euses culturel.les, nous considérons que ce terme englobe toutes les formes de travail liées à la création et que le maintien d'une telle création permet de maintenir de bonnes relations avec nous-mêmes, avec les autres et avec la nature.
-afk.doc
Un temps et un espace dédiés au tisserand.e pour travailler away-from-keyboard (loin du clavier). Clin d'œil à une installation et une performance antérieures, nous tissons des toiles pour des sculptures souples et fabriquons du papier à partir de retailles. Le bureau devient un métier à tisser à branches oscillantes et le clavier une navette de fil, l'institution et l'environnement rapide deviennent un garage - ses coins, ses murs, son plafond, ses lampes, son escalier spirale et ses sols deviennent un terrain de jeu, une opportunité d'apprentissage et d'enseignement pour matérialiser et rendre visible le travail derrière la création artistique et la création d'expositions.
Texte par Chloë p.f. Lalonde et María Andreína Escalona De Abreu
The colour of their eyes
Commissioned text by Louise CampionLet’s start with a cliché
What is Painting? A question persistently revisited. Inevitably, what is a painter?
The first instinct obviously, is to identify the painting as a flat surface, on which paint is applied, with the objective of creating an image, Art. The cliché definition, let's call it. We observe, however, a lot of contemporary counter-arguments to this claim. For instance, some artists who create pieces adhering to the former description define themselves as draftspersons, not painters. Some other artists love calling themselves painters, although they will not see a drop of paint flow at any stage of their making. Then there are the painters who do not aim at making art, they apply paint on a flat surface, your wall, for you to decorate it with cliché paintings later on. And finally, what about those artists who claim the painter title, who do produce cliché paintings but whose works, you realize after some investigation, were actually executed by… their painter assistant.
The definition of a painter is as abstract as its product can be, and just like an artist, I guess maybe all it takes to be one: is to declare yourself one.
Chloë Lalonde, my dear friend, was in residency with Céline Bureau last October, in collaboration with the Fofa Gallery of Montreal, and I had the opportunity to reflect on these thoughts. As it happens, Chloë has a practice far away from the cliché painter definition that one might use to categorize my own work. She, does not create images and art by applying paint on a flat surface, nor conform to any of the other examples of non-cliché accepted painters I have listed above. Yet exploring her display, I felt like she was the closest artist I have ever met to truly understand what it means to be one. To understand Painting.
Chloë Lalonde speaks to the process
You see, Chloë looked at Painting’s colossal history, its political and religious, even philosophical implications; its conventions and its rebellions; its drama and its beauty; and in awe, she immersed herself in it. Then she examined Painting today, but sadly couldn’t see a thing: it was moving too fast.
If you stand on the side of a highway looking straight across, can you describe who was driving the car that just passed you? Can you tell me about the colour of their eyes, the number of buttons on their shirt? Can you detail the grasp of their hands on the steering wheel; the slight tension in their smile; the creeping strain on the back of their neck?
You couldn’t see a thing: it was moving too fast. You’d have to pause to see these bits. Look at a very High Definition recording in slow-motion. Image by image, go through it. Decipher each of these features. From the mili-second the car's grille entered your field of vision, to the next mili-second when the license plate left it.
Chloë the painter, presses pause so she can see Painting: Knowing that the car was blue, and probably kinda small, and knowing the colour of the hundreds of other cars, kinda their size, isn’t and will never be enough. What used to be an exhaustive and timely process seems too fast to grasp and too blurry to look at today. I don’t need to expound to you why it is what it is now, you’ve heard it all, the weight of the capitalist pressure to produce more. The speed at which profits are expected to grow. The mass normalisation of quantity over quality. And more anxiously, the imminent climate collapse we are on the verge of experiencing, if not there already. All of this is going way too fast, and Painting in order to be seen, begs Chloë to press pause. To hell the finished products, to hell the number of them, to hell the price tag on their labels, and to hell all oppressive and irreversible materials. To me, through her practice, Chloë Lalonde says: ‘I press pause, and Painting, I will see you.’ — ‘I will take this timeline of a process that has been shrunk, and I will stretch it as much as I can like the elastic which holds my hair, I will extend you to your breaking point for you are holding my passion and I will divide you again and again into hundreds of smaller pieces that I will stretch again. And I will observe and understand what each of these pieces can hold in their turn, and I will recognize that your extent is infinite. And all your parts, are what makes you the historical and powerful medium that you are and through putting energy and care and time in each and everyone of them: I am painting. Hence, I am a painter. Painting starts when I see a colour I like in the wild, and damn it starts when I can hear it, it starts when I gather my rocks through which I will extract the pigment that matches that sound. It starts when I hold in my hands the fibers that I will turn into threads that I will then weave into my canvas, or cut and disperse and press into my paper. It all starts there, and I am a painter’
It is rather simple really, Chloë’s practice nurtures the materials and the process, the works aren’t done nor static but rather a constant continuation. A painting in progress is still, a painting. Most of you visiting my studio will fail to tell which is done and which is not because I am the painter, and I will make this decision and it will be valid. Now if I decide to stop at the white canvas will you curse me? Art history has proven and established that you wouldn’t. Chloë doesn’t stop: she pauses. She examines, and stretches and expands, and then she pauses again. That’s how she sees. And once in a while, she showcases it all through exhibitions or publications, hoping we will see Painting with her. A spatial and material display of her mind map, so we can try to keep up
It is okay though, she is a slow painter