Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau
September 9 – October 29, 2016

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Performance: Friday, September 9, 7:00 pm
Performed by Alexa Mardon, Erika Mitsuhashi and Lexi Vajda
Score by Alexander Moksos

“Exaggerate the movements and stretch the body in arabesque.
Make the body take the position of the object, where the object makes the body travel across.”

—Lum & Desranleau, performance notes

‍5 Tableaux: (It Bounces Back) is a performance and installation that expands Lum & Desranleau’s voracious experimentations with the lifespan of materials, how these become animated and form narrative threads and relationships, and the inevitable scuffs and decay incurred through materials’ exposure to external factors. 2015 marked Lum & Desranleau’s foray into live performance, where they combine dancers, sculpture and music within their immersive silkscreened paper installations, amplifying the performativity of the materials themselves. Objects and materials shape-shift, diffracting direct representations and resisting static identities, becoming imbued with the traces of time, labour and activity.

Collaboration and improvisation are central to Lum & Desranleau’s practice—whether together, with other people, or objects. Their focus on entropy and chance—a physical phenomenon where matter actively engages in the collaborative process—has further informed their belief in the spirit of collective authorship. Amidst the broader culture of chromophobia, they boldly opt for colour, diversity and alterity; against the cult of the new and pristine, they respond with recombinant strategies of DIY and re-use. Drawing from the history of tableaux vivants as a form of protest and appropriation, they add motion and sound, proposing non-hierarchical situations where distinctions between artistic mediums, and between humans and nonhumans, begin to dissolve. These gestures exude resilience, offering strategies in dealing with the accumulated burden of signification, and ways of being within a complex and indeterminate world.  

Originally conceived at the Fonderie Darling, Montréal for Place Publique, August 2015.
Presented at Or Gallery as part of SWARM 17.

Lum & Desranleau website
IMAGE CREDIT : Installation documentation by Dennis Ha, video documentation by Ian Barbour, performance documentation by Joni Low.

‍PERFORMANCE VIDEO‍