October 30, 2014
Residency : from October 24 to 30, 2014
Performance night : Thursday October 30 at 5pm
this city, this moment, this site…
Six performance artists embark upon a mission where their performative experience will doubtless take as many cues from each other as their encounters with downtown Sudbury.
The most recent initiative from the Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (GNO) in regards to the explosion of performance art in francophone Ontario, Mission Site is a performance artists’ residency project bringing six performance artists to Sudbury.Once gathered, they’ll explore, by means of all things performance, the concrete and conceptual spaces of the nickel city’s downtown.
The participating artists — Colette Jacques (Larder Lake), Hélène Lefebvre (Ottawa), Roy Lumagbas (Gatineau), Laurent Vaillancourt (Hearst), Mariana Lafrance (Manitoulin Island), and Julie Lassonde (Toronto) — each bring their own distinct approach to performance art, an interdisciplinary artistic tradition with an ever-increasing number of popular currents. The artists’ residency at the GNO gives every freedom to the participants who will establish among themselves the particular nature of their coordinated efforts and eventual collaborations.
While the artists will certainly offer a number of surprise performances in the downtown area, some of these will be announced through the GNO’s social media. Follow the GNO on Facebook,Twitter or Instagram.
With Mission Site, art once again escapes the gallery context in order to infiltrate day-to-day life in downtown Sudbury. Having explored the area during the residency, the artists’ “mission” concludes with an evening of performance art at the GNO (174 Elgin St.) on Thursday October 30th at 5 pm.
Accompanying text
Mariana Lafrance
Mariana Lafrance is an interdisciplinary artist working in Sudbury and on Manitoulin Island. While her earlier photographic work revealed a fascination with urban space and social phenomena, more recently her work has been about slowing down and tuning in to natural materials and moments. Mariana started learning photography in her early teens. She first exhibited her work in 2006 in Sudbury, following the launch of the popular photoblog La petite fumée... and the little smoke. She received a Northern Arts grant from the Ontario Arts Council in 2008 for her exhibition at the artist-run centre Galerie du nouvel-Ontario in Sudbury. The same year she published a first book of photos with Les Éditions Prise de Parole, entitled Site Unseen/La ville invisible, grouping together her photographs of Sudbury. In 2011, she was awarded an emerging artist grant from the Ontario Arts Council, with which she developed a work exploring the challenges of anxiety in social settings.
Artist ProfileColette Jacques
Colette Jacques (Larder Lake) has been working full-time as a visual artist since 1986. A multidisciplinary artist, her work explores the mediums of performance, painting, sculpture, multimedia and installation. Propelled by the discovery of her algonquin ancestry, her artistic pursuits are intimately related to her heritage. Her work has been been shown in Ontario, Québec and the United States.
Artist ProfileRoy Lumagbas
Originally from the Philippines, Roy Lumagbas has been unleashing his performance work in Canada since 2007. In 2008 he was nominated for the Golden Cherry Award for performance artists of the year in the Ottawa-Gatineau region. He has participated in many contemporary art events such as the Symposium international de Baie-Saint-Paul and the Festival international d’art performatif at l’Écart, lieu d’art actuel in Rouyn-Noranda.
Artist ProfileLaurent Vaillancourt
Laurent Vaillancourt participated in the cultural awakening movement of French Ontario in the early 1970s and remains intimately linked to this community. Hearst, in northern Ontario, remains his home base. The artist has been and continues to be fascinated by the steel cable, a true metaphor for his deep desire to link together, through this symbolic material, the people of the small communities with which he identifies. Steel cable is rarely used as a raw material. Its flexibility, its curves, its elegance and its torsional strength are the attributes that Vaillancourt explores by manipulating it. Found objects are also increasingly elements that form part of its basic materials. For the artist, the object carries meaning. The object is an artefact. It is used to tell stories.
Artist ProfileJulie Lassonde
Originally from Montreal, Julie Lassonde is an interdisciplinary improviser and performance artist who is interested in subjects such as gender, intimacy, socio-legal norms affecting daily life and processes related to performativity, such as repetition. Trained in corporeal mime school, she presented solo performances and improvisations in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, Berkeley, San Francisco and Edinburgh. She also studied law at McGill University. She is a member of the Law Society of Canada and the Barreau du Québec. In 2006, she was awarded the Law and Society Graduate Fellowship and an interdisciplinary master’s degree at the University of Victoria. She received the Innovative Electronic Theses & Dissertations Award from the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations for her thesis, in 2007, in Uppsala, Sweden. Julie published "Performing Law" in The International Journal of the Arts in Society (2006) and co-edited the book Collision: Interarts Practice and Research (2008).
Artist Profile