Josée Dubeau

SPACE/Canada Council artist in residence Josée Dubeau will be in residence at SPACE between April 2011 and September 2011.

Artist Statement from Josée Dubeau:

My installations, made out of pine wooden rods, draw on a variety of activities that set us apart individually and collectively to recreate environments that bring out the nomenclature of interior architecture. They reproduce reality with the geometrical regularity of a three-dimensional drawing. In the absence of surface and weight, the space being mimicked appears in its fragile transparency : the resulting lightness leads us to believe, from an existential point of view, in the concept of a detached and unattached world, like that of a scale model.

They also focus on the typology of public and domestic activities through the graphic codes of design and architecture. The geometrical modular environments combine the vocabulary of drawing and the esthetic of minimalist sculpture. By doing «pure contour drawing» in space, the installations intend to schematize my perception of a performative space-time which is organized by our hyper-functional living and our multi-tasking activities. 

In these parallel duplicate worlds, transparency leads the visitor through a familiar environment reflecting an outline visual field which can sometimes become illusional. This open networks describe an abstraction that oscillates between two-dimensional and three- dimensional representation using lightness and void in order to create a psychological distance or a critical immersion. The resulting dematerialization reveals more than arrangements of furniture as it investigates the significance of our means of production, consumption and communication.

This inter-penetration of interior and exterior also emphasizes a tension between illusion and reality which is defined by the simultaneous perception of different levels of depth, a quality usually attributed to glass architecture. A dream of transparency, which was long transcended by modern architects, appears in my work as a grid sculpting the frontiers of an illusional ruin. Paradoxallly, the lightweight pinewood, in its analogy with balsawood models, mirrors the making of a future that takes part into a fragile rand empty world.