Dominique Pétrin: The living room & other displays
September 12 to October 17, 2014
Opening Reception September 12 at 8pm
Artist talk hosted and presented by the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery Thursday, September 11, 12pm
Saskatoon Public Library reading list including books on Dali, Rauschenberg and Bridget Riley
For the past five years, Pétrin’s artistic endeavours have involved installations where silk-screened works are displayed in a submerged space. The installation is employed to impose a musicality and a rhythm that is invoked by the repetition of motifs and the physicality of colours, creating a strong dialogue between the images, their support and configuration. Enabling the artist to make use of bold lines and colours in order to create worlds that are vibrant and hypnotic.
These visual demands put the spectator’s body in an unstable position: between pleasure and displeasure, immersed in a feeling of vertigo similar to a light state of intoxification. This is reinforced by the monumental character of the installation. The patterns are dizzying. The overall effect is noisy and thought provoking.
Dominique Pétrin is a multidisciplinary artist born in Montreal. In visual arts as well as performance, her interests converge towards producing altered states of conscience and perception, be it through cognitive or visual illusions, or, for her performances, the use of hypnosis. A former member of the band Les Georges Leningrad, she also collaborated with such renowned artists as Sophie Calle and Pil & Galia Kolletiv. She staged performances at the Frieze Art Fair in London, at the Désordres Festival in Lille, MUTEK, Viva! and Rouyn-Noranda’s Performance Biennale. She was rewarded with an artist residency in Nunavik by the Quebec Council for the Arts, participated in the 29th Contemporary Art Symposium in Baie-Saint-Paul, and was selected for the last instalment of the Quebec Triennial at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art.
