Over the course of the coming year, artist Mathieu Jacques will take on the role of consultant at articule and conduct research into what it means to be an independently managed artist-run centre. Jacques will interview the artist-run centre community and ask interviewees for proposals, realistic or idealistic, regarding articule's future.

Jacques will present his research using artistic, rather than business, tools. He will transcribe the interviews and then play with the transcriptions themselves, creating abstract compositions through tracing, print-making, and collage. The resulting works will summarize the discussions had so that they may be ‘read’ on both critical and aesthetic levels by the viewer. Transferring text to image will allow the artist to juxtapose contradicting and otherwise irreconcilable ideas natural to artist-run centres.  

The proposals that emerge will be represented in a series of collages and bound together in books. Each step in the process will be documented and may be followed on a blog. The accumulation of documents will highlight the way in which the artist's re-workings of the interviewees' texts reflect the social nature of the organization that unites them. From this, it will be possible to identify participants’ common objectives.

 

Mathieu Jacques is interested in the blurred boundaries that separate the individual from the group, and the way in which they are maintained through performative identity; he searches these boundaries for a space of freedom and possible emancipation. The repetitive gestures of printmaking and video offer him the opportunity to contemplate this ambiguity.

Mathieu Jacques has exhibited and given performances at Arprim, Atelier Graff, articule, the Montréal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Francofolies, the Maison de la culture Maisonneuve, and the Maison de la culture du Plateau Mont-Royal, as well as at the Vaste et Vague artist-run centre, Carleton-sur-Mer. He has also carried out an artist’s residency at Centre CLARK and at atelier Circulaire.

Jacques is also recognized for his performances with the Montréal-based Organ Mood collective at Centre Phi; the Montréal Museum of Contemporary Art; the Métropolis; Club Soda; Écart, Rouyn-Noranda; Sporobole, Sherbrooke; Centro de Cultura Digital, Estrela de Luz, Mexico, and at festivals including Je-st, Mutek, and Montréal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.

Exhibitions  

Participating Artists: Mathieu Jacques (Montréal)
Curator(s):
Credits: Photo : Mathieu Jacques, 2015