Diffusion :

• Articule, September 2007, Articule, Montreal
• Val d'Argent Festival, February 2008, France
• E-Fagia, February 2009, Toronto
• File, March 2009, Sao Paulo

Text by Élène Tremblay, curator

The Web lends itself easily to the disguising of identities and encourages many questions to be asked about the verisimilitude of the information provided by the people who present themselves on it: it has become a relational tool where individuals try to enter into more intimate relationships. For this new web project, we wanted to bring together artists who already use self-representation in their work, and invite them to create interactive works in which their fictional, plausible identities would unfold.
Marie-Josée Hardy, Marcio Lana Lopez, Maryse Larivière, and James Prior are the artists behind My contacts, in which they play the roles of people called by the owner of a lost mobile phone. Their names, phone numbers and other personal information appear in the menu of the phone, which serves as an interface for getting in touch with them, or at least with the visible and accessible part of their characters.

The image of the artist's body acts as evidence in these web works; me voilà. It is the place where we meet others and mediate between them. The body is the first common place, shared and recognised; a place of similarity and difference, a place of exclusion and inclusion, a place of multiple conflicts and deliberations. The artist offers the image of his body, shows the particular arrangement of his facial features, and so on. These contain, paradoxically, qualities of both opacity and expressivity (masking/showing). These are the same elements as those offered by an actor, only the fact that it is the author and not an interpreter transforms the reception of this body, this voice. Self-representation acts as a decoy for authenticity. It allows the artist to play with the idea of unveiling; revealing or hiding, telling or simulating.

The exhibition of oneself, whether in drag or not, remains an act of mutual fiction in which audience and performer play the game of authenticity in the distorted arena of the public sphere. For where there is an audience, there is theatre. For the artist, it doesn't matter whether the game is generous or narcissistic, because he makes his body and his identity the place, the terrain, the decoy for this game to take place. An ideal terrain, a decoy par excellence, for a simulated encounter.

Marcio Lana Lopez uses two visual sources - videos of his face recorded by a webcam and photographs of his grandparents' trip to the Middle East in 1957 - to produce a narrative, or rather a question, about our perception of others. The webcam seems to act like a mirror in which Narcissus contemplates every last hair on his beard. But here the beard is a veritable mask of identity. A number of questions arise from the experience of this work: What roles do appearance, resemblance and the gaze play in the construction of our cultural relationships? Has the thin line between the plausible and the real been definitively abolished? And, accepting this contingency, how can we apply the ambiguity of our imagination to the creation of new narrative forms and possibilities? How can we translate the complexity of discourse into a medium based on the eventual, the accumulation, the exchange, the multiplicity, the instant? The webcam moving across the surface of the artist's face and these family archives without descriptive captions give us a sense of the opacity and thinness of Web 2.0. How can we stretch and/or deepen this surface?

For Maryse LarivièreWhen it comes to revealing himself, it will not be by opening the exhibitionist's coat but rather by opening up the contents of his personal computer to potential hackers. Deliberately choosing the position of a victim of hacking, the artist reveals personal aspects of his life (family celebrations, artist's file, projects in progress) to the public, who, from being curious, become, not without unease, voyeurs and hackers. But what do these scattered fragments really reveal? Do we know Maryse Larivière better after consulting these visual documents pseudo-illegally? The opacity of the self-image is summoned up in this apparent transparency.

The archiving power of the web is also highlighted, in the access offered to the contents of this hard drive containing hundreds of image files. The work cleverly raises the question of the right to privacy.

For James Priorthe combination of the various activities associated with his multiple identities as a father and artist (and others) results in a marathon in which the young child is literally carried on his back by the father in shaping activities that appear all the more difficult and irreconcilable. The presence of the child, in the context of the father's activities, makes us aware of the difficulties of reconciling work and family (to use a fashionable terminology). The difficulty of reconciling his multiple identities gives rise to the heart-rending feeling of not being able to be in the right place at the right time, of not being able to follow his heart, of not being able to carry out each of these activities properly. The multi-tasking father appears divided and torn. The desire to lose weight acts as a metaphor for difficulty and effort.

Wrapped in the kitschiness of pink, the young woman in Marie-Josée Hardy seems to be naively opting for the utopia of possible happiness. Collecting other people's recipes for happiness, she tries to embody them, make them her own, even test them.

Can other people's happiness be my own? Is there a recipe that works?

In the final analysis, these efforts appear to be in vain, because they remain in the realm of the simulacrum and the fantasy. Faced with the spectacle of so much effort and vain pursuit, visitors will be able to see the quantity, the inventiveness or even the banality of the means without, however, being able to feel the effects. As we explore these multiple pleasures, a kind of panorama or global portrait emerges, showing the triviality of everything that can bring happiness. A touch of irony emerges in the artist's approach, as he has deliberately transformed the idea of happiness into a masquerade in which there can be no real encounter with happiness, only its evocation.

In the face of these works of self-representation, the public's judgement and appreciation seek to eliminate the rough edges, to interpret the signs as coherent and unambiguous. The artist's body is impregnated with the identity of the fictional character. The author and his creature are confused because they share the same body. And the author contributes to this confusion by using personal aspects in the making of the work. What if James Prior really was a retarded loner (Pierre and Pom Pom: Two Hearts Beat as One, Centre VU, Quebec 2004) and a fishing enthusiast (Fishing with John James, Skol, Montreal, 2005), and what if Marie-Josée Hardy really was looking for a recipe for happiness, and what if Maryse Larivière's family life and love life (La main qui tient le regard, Galerie Clark, 2006) gave us an accurate portrait of the artist, and what if Marcio Lana Lopez, an artist of Brazilian origin, actually had family roots in the Middle East?

The question arises: is intimacy in representation more intimacy or more representation? In the spectacle society by Guy Debord, only the representation would remain, and the impact of this intimacy would be null and void. This would be true if we ignored the immense desire to believe, to share, to find common ground, to recognise. A desire that makes us open up momentarily to the other within us, ignoring the falseness of contexts. A desire to laugh at oneself in the other, in the artist who exhibits himself. In this encounter, mediated by the image, the two bodies of artist and visitor are not co-present. Rather, it is a contact that is dreamt up by both sides, and which takes shape thanks to the artist's voluntary exhibition and the public's sense of humour and playfulness. In spite of everything, these works remain an invitation to share an intimacy, even if this intimacy does not drop all the masks, on the contrary.

In the society of the infosphere and digital culture, where representation is exponentially multiplied, the desire for encounters and intimacy is exacerbated, drawn into a never-ending quest. This society of the infosphere appears to be the ideal place for masquerade, a ludicrous mirror in which information floats without anchorage, offering a space that is both rich and blurred, allowing multiple movements to take place between the artist's intentions and the public's discernment.

Élène Tremblay
August 2007