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  • Frédéric Lavoie, 146 secondes d’écoute active avec John (2011)

    Frédéric Lavoie, 146 secondes d’écoute active avec John (2011)

  • Frédéric Lavoie, Barda, (2011)

    Frédéric Lavoie, Barda, (2011)

  • Frédéric Lavoie, Le bruit et le silence, (2011)

    Frédéric Lavoie, Le bruit et le silence, (2011)

  • Frédéric Lavoie, 146 secondes d’écoute active avec John (2011)

    Frédéric Lavoie, 146 secondes d’écoute active avec John (2011)

  • Frédéric Lavoie, Barda (2011)

    Frédéric Lavoie, Barda (2011)

  • Barda, Frédéric Lavoie, Le Bruit et le silence dans les livres de Marguerite Duras (2011)

    Barda, Frédéric Lavoie, Le Bruit et le silence dans les livres de Marguerite Duras (2011)

  • Barda, Frédéric Lavoie (2011)

    Barda, Frédéric Lavoie (2011)

  • Frédéric Lavoie, Barda (2011)

    Frédéric Lavoie, Barda (2011)


BARDA


Frédéric Lavoie (Montréal)


June 2 to 26, 2011

Norman-McLaren Gallery of the Cinémathèque québécoise.

These three new works by Frédéric Lavoie, recipient of the 2010-11 PRIM-Dazibao grant, continue his investigations into the relations between the audible and the visible. By purposefully avoiding fixed stances, Lavoie brings out the shifts, lack of synchronicity, scissions and other forms of diffraction that can arise in the relation between sound(s) and image(s) when one is not used as an inert medium for the other.

For Barda, Lavoie filmed entirely familiar sequences, but ones full of sonic potential: a garden, a walking path, a work site, etc. He left these scenes silent and invited three sound effects people to reconstruct with the sound for them. The resulting sound tracks are played synchronously in the exhibition space. The visitor hears them simultaneously or can approach each sound source to isolate (imperfectly) one or another of the sound tracks. Apart from the places and moments they appear to describe, these few pictures, which trace the irrevocable interstice between its loss and recreation, between the overlapping of images and their interpretations, document doubt, a space-time rendered uncertain.

Le Bruit et le silence dans les livres de Marguerite Duras is a silent film composed exclusively of subtitles without images. Not without irony, Lavoie has taken from Duras’ work every sentence containing the words bruit (noise), silence, écouter (listen) and entendre (hear) and, using these excerpts, written a “typically Duras-like” story told through the subtitles.

146 secondes d’écoute active avec John is the result of a shot-by-shot construction of the opening sequence in Brian de Palma’s film Blow Out, in which a sound technician witnesses an accident while recording nocturnal sounds in a park.

Between what is not said and what is not revealed, what is made available to see and to hear, Frédéric Lavoie develops a novel language which forces images and sounds to enter into a different kind of dialogue, beyond the expected echoing of each other or mutual support of each other.


Frédéric Lavoie lives and works in Montreal. After an undergraduate degree in anthropology, he obtained a Master’s Degree in Visual and Media Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His work has been shown at venues such as the Galerie de l’UQÀM, SKOL, B-312, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée régional de Rimouski, and at several international video events, including the European Media Art Festival in Germany, the Split Film Festival in Croatia, Antimatter and Signal and Noise in British Columbia and the International Festival of Films on Art. In 2008 he received the Plein sud grant and sejourned in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts.

I would like to thank the Darling Foundry for enabling me to sojourn at Les Récollets in Paris, where I began to conceive the project Barda; Stéphane Cadote, Alexis Farand and Benoit Cool for agreeing to play the fastidious game of creating the sound effects for this work, Bruno Bélanger and the team at PRIM for special access to their sound studio; as well as Martin Hurtubise for his scrupulous listening skills while mixing the sound track. I also thank Yasmine Amor for her help in decipher the couple’s conversation in the sequence from Blow Out, Guy Asselin and Natasha Prévost for finding Marguerite Duras’ books while I was staying in the forest; and, finally, Étienne Fortin for his attention to detail while assembling and printing the piece 146 secondes d’ecoute active avec John and the team at Sagamie. I also thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support.

Frédéric Lavoie

Dazibao thanks the artist as well as PRIM for their generous collaboration and its members for their support.




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