Claudette Lemay

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TIOU! | audio installation 8 channels | 2011 | (extract 1:00)

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“Claudette Lemay is interested in our relationship to language. Full of humour, the audio installation Tiou! (2011) demonstrates a kind of human failure to faithfully reproduce bird song through the means of onomatopoeia. In this attempt to simulate a soundtrack that poetically incorporates a part of nature, she puts in perspective the disparity between reality and its reproduction. By setting up dreamlike sound landscapes originating from tiny speakers, the artist echoes human-made bird houses. The laying out of picture rails, a kind of forest pastiche, becomes an anchoring point in the exhibition space as many stopping places enable one’s positioning through the built environment. This intimate installation demands for a rapprochement between the visitor and the work. Lemay is interested in the encounter between nature and culture, landscape and body, in how they resonate on a sensory level. Attentive to detail, these woods impose the artificial. Through this work with spatiality, the artist poetically asserts that we must stop a moment in order to better understand phenomena that go beyond us.”

Text by the curator duo N. & M. (Nadège Grebmeier Forget and Manon Tourigny), leaflet for the exhibition Analogie du repli : une œuvre paysage, Maison des Arts de Laval, October 2011.