 Samuel Roybois is interested in the complex dynamics defining our relationship to the built environment. His multifarious practice draws on the everyday, the history of architecture, and the critique of different modes of cultural production. His work has been exhibited at numerous public and private institutions nationally and internationally. And he is an assistant professor in creative studies at the UBC Okanagan. Please join me in welcoming Samuel Roybois. I've been thinking a lot lately, nonstop. Not that I have more ideas or that the old ideas that I have have gotten any better. I just have been thinking a lot lately. It's hard to say exactly what I've been thinking about. Things get mixed up quite fast up there. I have been thinking about a show I presented two years ago at Art Speak here in Vancouver. I had a great trip despite a brutal feeling of cognitive dissonance. I had a great trip despite a brutal feeling of cognitive dissonance. I had a great trip despite a brutal feeling of cognitive dissonance. I can't remember where I went, but I had a great trip despite a brutal feeling of cognitive dissonance. But before talking about existing work, let me tell you about my initial exhibition proposal for Art Speak, the one that the gallery rejected. Of course, this proposal will sound much more interesting than the work actually on display. Unrealized projects are always much better than the ones that see the light of day. A thousand times better. To put it simply, I wanted to take the entire facade of the gallery off. The main floor's facade would have been removed, turning the exhibition space into an exposed cavity a pit open to all to wander through to occupy it, sleep in it, hang out, drink, fuck. I'd been told by the gallery that in the making, my project could have compromised the building. A location classified as a heritage building with a plaque and all. And well, that the space could have been damaged to a point of no repair, and while the neighbors would not have appreciated all the ruckus, noise, and smells, it could have been a mess, but in the process, everything going through that breach would have become the greatest show on earth. The reason why I mentioned this rejected proposal is to give you a sense of the spirit I'm working in. Where did I, let's see, yeah, the spirit I'm working in. And also gain a better appreciation for this upcoming presentation. The fact that this project never became reality gives it a certain significance. It's one of these things that will never happen. An idea that will remain an idea. It will never, never, never happen. In the next hour, I will be talking about previous work, my art speak exhibition, and also about more recent work such as, Not a New World, just an old trick. Before I go any further, I would like to thank Kyla for inviting me for this talk tonight, and also giving me the privilege to meet with some of her students and discover truly amazing stuff. I also would like to thank Douglas Hofstetter for writing this talk while I was taking a nap. Now what are the contingent forces structuring our perception of the world? What objective parameters influence everyday decision making? How do we construct an anticipated vision of tomorrow? These are the very large questions I have been struggling with in the past decades. As you may suspect, I haven't found the final answers yet. As an artist, I believe that these questions could be explored through an extended understanding of the built environment. Therefore, I've been interested in all types of fabricated spaces such as homes and cities, but also vehicles, clothes and furniture. I feel that these delimiting structures participate in a dynamic manner in the elaboration of the self and the other. Over the years, I created a large number of immersive installations and insisted on the fact that the viewer should be the center of interest. These projects are rooted in the critical analysis of exhibition spaces, their origins and the role they have been playing in the development and appreciation of art. I heard a noise and I ran away is the title of the earliest work I'll show you tonight. I feel that this work was the beginning of something for me. I think it was the beginning of simplicity. Simplicity is underrated. There is very little value in simplicity. We assume simplicity to be available everywhere. That's how things should be, simple. We live in a modern world, things are simple. If things are not simple now, they are just about to become as simple as they can be. Coffee is simple, hamburgers are simple, computers are simple, money is simple, drugs are simple, work is simple. The things you have to do daily are simple. So when somebody works hard at doing something that in the end looks simple, we wonder what's the big deal? That's my feeling, that's all. So this work is simple. Holes in the wall, light coming through the holes. We all know the trick. I hid the lights between two layers of wall. The starting point for this installation is a plan for a building from French revolutionary architect Etienne Louis Boulet. In 1784, he designed this building called Cenotaph for Newton. It is a celebration of human technical achievements where the universe is represented within a man-made structure. How cool can that be? He had been called a utopian architect alongside Le Coeur and Le Duc, the architect behind the royal saltworks at the Arc des Cenots. Goethe talked about architecture as petrified music. And this is what these architects were all about. Monumental monuments, dream buildings, and other utopianism. Boulet's Cenotaph for Newton behind its modern-looking resolution was at the time a technical impossibility. The interior, mimicking a starry night sky, would have been a beautiful thing, but the guy could not get it done. So I did a version of it. I scaled down the dream, brought it down to a more manageable scale, brought it down to my own means. It now belongs to the everyday. My initial interest in Boulet's work was linked to a broader research I initiated early 2000 regarding the manifestation of utopianism in contemporary life. It felt at the time that sociopolitical options were sparse, that there wasn't that much room for a growing social alternative to capitalism. Consumers seemed under control. Politicians seemed under control. Intellectuals seemed under control. Artists seemed under control. For a little while before September 11th, it felt like things had come to a standstill. After 9-11, the whole dynamic didn't really change, but certain things simply became apparent. Institutions became stronger. Power brokers became more powerful. Consumers became more and more under control. The social structure now had a face. So I started to think about the structure I had put myself into as an artist. If I could see the walls of the room I'm sitting in, I might eventually be able to step out for a stroll. So I started to look at the prima materia I was working with, the exhibition space. I started to draw parallels between the exhibition space and the fundaments of Thomas More's Utopia, a space without a location or history in perpetual denial of its own existence and completely turned towards the achievement of an uninterrupted moment of perfection. So inspired by Ryan O'Dearty's book, The White Cube, I started to produce a number of pieces that were putting the gallery in check, like the monologue first presented in 2003. Once I had recognized the power of influence the exhibition space had on anyone looking at art, I felt like getting rid of that, getting rid of that force altogether. I could show my work in a remote location, the way I did on multiple occasions, but this would lack the tension that only a gallery visits expectations could provide. The three-roomed apartment-like structure I built inside the gallery hid the exhibition space entirely. We are not in a gallery anymore. We are now somewhere else, a place with different rules. Somehow this piece helped me define some concepts that I would be working with to this day, such as the immediate acknowledgement of a given context as being an integral part of the work. And also the establishment of a defined structure that will both welcome and frame chaos. With the monologue, I wanted to make the exhibition space disappear so one could bypass all intermediaries and enter into direct contact with my work. But I mostly wanted to celebrate banality. So I directed the public's attention into incongruous small accumulations of objects. There would be heaps, seemingly personal objects, but they'd just been freely gathered without great discrimination, without any story to support them. Through small cutouts shaped like holes for electrical outlets, one could catch sight of them behind the new walls I had assembled. In those large, bare, unfinished rooms, competition for attention was low, so these ordinary objects easily became the main attraction. Or as Baudrillard would say, they would turn out to become the punctum. And from there, the eye can go in all directions. Anything can look interesting. One day, a young man looking a little troubled came to me right after experiencing one of my installations. He told me that in the middle of his visit, he didn't know what he should give attention to. What objects should be looked at and read? What traces on the walls should be considered having any symbolic value? He looked anxious. I told him not to worry, that things would get better as the show fades out of his memory and that things would eventually get back to normal and that his natural sense of discrimination would get back on top. This did not make him feel better. He became really angry and agitated and he started shouting, give me back my reality! Give it back to me, motherfucker! Well, I got angry myself. And I told him he'd go to hell. And it's at that moment that he decided to punch me in the face. Then he left after recovering. I started working on this solo exhibition, Improbable and Ridiculous, that was going to take place at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. I was a new guy on the scene and I remember the museum asking for something spectacular. They wanted a show. The whole thing could be meaningless, but it should at least be entertaining. I told him that I was ready to cover up any eventual mishap by creating some spectacular work. I'm not too sure if I succeeded in that sense, but here is a couple of pieces that were in the show so you can judge for yourself. Ghetto had visitors crawling in a reduced space, a minuscule bedroom with one large window looking out. Anyone inside there would simply become part of the work. I had one single intention here, really, and it was to have people to think, I'm here. I'm here. By bending over, crawling in, one would get the impression of giving themselves a location. They could even lock themselves in if they felt the need. The other pivotal piece in the show was this one, satellites, where two rooms were endlessly mechanically spinning on themselves, their emptiness as their principal feature. In order to look inside, one had to constantly move around, push in circles by those 2,000 pound structures, losing sense of direction. Getting lost is a rare event. It's probably even harder than it has ever been in the whole history of mankind. But being here is harder. Contemporary life is all about there, and not so much about here. There, tomorrow, sending, getting there, watching, upgrading, commuting, touring, becoming better. As curator Ralph Rougoff noted in his essay for the exhibition Psycho Buildings, for many of us, the world is now mainly intelligible as an endless picture, end quote. It's always about the exterior coming in, turning us into empty pots, walking around town, feeling sorry for ourselves. Being asked to look at something that happened thousands of times a day. Heads are turning, eyes are moving. Look at me please, please. Would you look over here? My attention is apparently my most precious asset. I sometimes do this very simple counting thing. I count from 100 all the way to zero. It does work every time. 100, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 91, 90, 89, 88, 87, 86, 85, 84, 83, 82, 81, 80, 79, 78, 77, 76, 75, 74, 73, 72, 71, 70, 69, 68, 67, 66, 65, 64, 63, 62, 61, 60, 59, 58, 57, 56, 55, 54, 53, 52, 51, 50, 49, 48, 47, 46, 44, 43, 42, 41, 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 0. Shallow Island created in 2005 was another work that took the exhibition space into consideration, as much as it celebrated the unremarkable and the banal, producing an amalgam of vernacular architecture and modernist aesthetics. I was then reflecting on the role of built environment in the creation of necessary philosophical boundaries. I thought that architecture is keeping us from acting up. And I'm not talking about jails here, but rather the capacity buildings have to fulfill this needed impression that everything has an end, not just spatially, but socially and mentally. We move around, we go places, we come back, enter rooms, leave rooms, enter another room, look through the window onto a building across the street, walk downstairs, open the door, walk through the door frame, run on the sidewalk, turn around at the intersection, come back on our steps, go back to our home. As for this installation, after some investigation, one could find a way to climb in the elevated room, ultimately finding him or herself face to face with an air duct, that big green thing that no one really notices usually becomes here something that we admire. And when you look around, you see this other trap in the floor. Well, one could walk to it and climb down this rather long ladder. From there, you could keep walking in this dark corridor, completely dark. You could not see your hand if it was in front of your eyes. And that experience of walking in total darkness would last a little while, something like a day or two depending on your speed. No light, no sun, nobody. It's not surprising that after a while you would lose track of time. Some would use their cell phones to light themselves, but after a while the battery would wear out and they would find themselves plunged back into darkness. And that thing, that corridor was straight, just straight. So you just walk in a straight line for hours and hours in complete darkness and after a while you can't help but feeling completely lost. Other people could be heard, but it was hard to figure out if they were in front or behind you because of the echo. And how far would they be anyway? 500 meters, 5 miles? But one would know deep inside that something would be found at some point, that it would end. It is art after all, right? So after walking in the dark for days, feeling hungry, stinking, you would find a door and it would lead you right here. At first you would think to yourself, thank God I'm finally somewhere. But you would soon realize that this whole environment meant absolutely nothing to you. Sure, there was light, but this place had not much to offer. You knew where you were, but you would still be lost. One could try to understand what was in front of him, but logic would fall short. It was interesting to see that some visitors would react violently to the situation. For some reason they felt like they'd been tricked, that they had never bought into something, that they'd never signed up for, that the experience was too much, grotesque. After wandering around for a little while, viewers, and please don't forget that that's what they were after all, would try to find the way out. But soon realized that this task was more difficult than expected. They wrapped their heads around the idea of sticking around momentarily. They organized, regrouped, built camps, looked for food, and kept going with their lives. This is a work I've done in 2009 at Vancouver Art Gallery for a show that, titled How Soon Is Now, curated by Kathleen Ritter, I basically recreated a music recording booth and I called it ugly today, beautiful tomorrow. It's a soundproof room with an irregular shape, meaning no parallel walls in order to avoid echo through sound bouncing back and forth. The public was invited to enter that space and to use the instruments that I brought in there, one electric guitars, one electric bass, two keyboards, a full drum kit, and two microphones. All the instruments were hooked up to a mixing board and the signal was broadcast into the gallery's lobby. Some knew it, some didn't. People coming in the Vancouver Art Gallery would hear these sometimes amateurs guitar strumming, cacophony, conversations, any sound produced in that apparently secluded environment. That feeling of seclusion did matter to me. I wanted to suggest to the public that my installation could be some sort of escape from the gallery space an alternative to a codified environment. The influence of gallery space settings is hard to dispute and I sometimes regard them as machines designed for the production of meaning. So viewers would come in there, spend some time, sometimes a few hours, play music, meet strangers, play music with them, impromptu audiences would build up and so on. The great thing about all this is that I recorded everything. I kept everything. What would be my work without documentation anyway? So I have hours and hours and hours of recorded material that I listen to regularly. There is a bit of everything in there ranging from total garbage to the sublime. I always saw the recording studio as another space with utopian qualities like the gallery space. So having a recording booth in the gallery is therefore some sort of mise en abîme, another image I quite like. The recording booth's function is to create a clear distinction between here and there, between itself and the rest of the world, reorganizing priorities and rigidly assigning people specific roles and responsibilities. It's highly functional as long as the exterior world does not interfere with its activities. And all that mechanic is geared toward a greater absolute goal, a goal that goes beyond the capacity of producing great music, but better than that producing a greater self. It's not so much about a collective enterprise creating an ideal society than about an individual creating an ideal identity. So while listening to these tapes, I stumbled upon a particular recording. I had never heard a voice like this one before. It was quite stunning. I was simply moved. I decided to find out who it was. I needed to find out who could sing this way, but that was not exactly an easy task. All I had was the date and time of the recording. I knew when this person had been present in the gallery, and so I knew that the person would have been filmed by the Vancouver Art Gallery's security cameras. I'd never gotten in touch with the gallery, but they refused to let me have a look at the footage that they had claiming privacy issues. At this point, I had no choice but to break into the gallery to access the videotapes, so that's what I did. That was not an easy task. I first had to find a way to get in, which I did by digging a hole at night from the front lawn all the way to the foundation wall. Cracked open the foundation wall with C4 explosives. Got in, walked all the way to the security office, put the guards to sleep with chloroform. Yes, it does work. And then once in there, I realized that they had thousands of tapes, but that none had been marked. So now the real challenge was to find the location of the footage amongst miles and miles of tape. I could not leave with all those tapes on me, so I sat down and started watching them one by one. The next work is an audio piece that also involves performance. Quebec City Biennial invited me to present work in 2010. Quebec City is my hometown, so it's always a pleasure to go back there and create and present projects. The theme of the Biennial that year was catastrophe. And I realized that my only experience with catastrophes had been of a mediated nature. I never experienced any catastrophes firsthand. So I decided to express the point of view of an individual that only saw catastrophes as something exotic. For my project, I rented a house in a popular neighborhood of the city, Cartier Saint-Jean-Baptiste, located between the bourgeois Upper City and the gentrifying Lower City. This is a neighborhood that I know well, where I lived for years and is known for its bohemian communes, outdated hippies, artists of all categories, and its strong working-class roots. So my project takes place in a three-story house usually occupied by a mother and her daughter. When the public would get to the house, they would be welcomed by someone at the door and handed an iPod. The recorded audio work would guide the visitor through the house. A voiceover would point out certain elements of the habitation, personal items, lead the visitors through its own appreciation of the site, commenting on everything sharing lost thoughts. Here's a leaky tap. Look at it for a minute. Here on the thin plank wall, a sticker representing the number six. Who put it there? Could it be an inverted nine? Follow me here. Look at this crack on the ceiling. Beautiful crack. Some sound work would punctually get mixed in with the voiceover. Slowly the visitors would tour this person's intimacy, making their way to the top story, and there they would find three bedrooms. As they end up in the master bedroom, they discover someone sleeping in a bed or pretending to sleep. I hired an actor to perform the act of sleeping through all the opening hours, giving him without a doubt the gig of his life. The voiceover that people had been listening to for the past 15 minutes became specific. The voice was his voice. You could hear him think. You could hear him dream his dream. What was said would go in all directions, words bouncing around, images, lost ideas, but all those would somehow come together to create a fantastic, fantastic, fantastic, but coherent picture of some dramatic events. And then for quite a while people would be hanging out with this guy sleeping in the master bedroom looking at him, and I think that afterwards it created this impression of having met the guy for real. One felt like saying goodbye to him when leaving the room. I used to work a very intense physical job, very demanding work. Very demanding work. All day from very early in the morning until late at night and I would be back home exhausted, not able to do much. And then when I'd go to bed I'd fall asleep very quickly in a matter of a few seconds. I would have the most intense dreams. Nothing crazy would actually happen, but everything about those dreams would feel intense. I would sweat like there's no tomorrow. But beyond anything, the hardest thing was to move when I would wake up. I could not get my body to move. I would be plenty aware of being awake. I would control my thoughts. I could hear ambient noises and feel the sheets on my legs, but nothing would move. And then I would panic. Breathing would become increasingly difficult. I'd try to shake myself out of that state as much as I could battling against that forced inertia. After long minutes of fright I would manage to move one eyelid, just a little, and then I knew that things would be okay. But let's step back a little. I think I should give you more context. Toward 2007-2008 I felt like bringing another dimension to my work. Let's call it a fourth dimension. I wanted to create pieces that would reveal themselves over time like a musical piece does. Things would make sense if experienced in a specific order. I was not interested in creating any story in particular, but rather using the notions of anticipation, linearity, beginning and end to evoke a possible story or a group of events. These large installations will, most of the time, emerge from consideration of a specific site or context. For example, Lost Hope's Squat, an installation I created in 2007 for Republic Gallery in Vancouver. The whole structure that you can see here was built out of necessity. I was without a studio at the time and I needed to do some carpentry for this upcoming show. I decided to turn that constraint into the central element of the exhibition. From there the simple structure, built to contain dust, became a spot for me to hang out for a while. I then integrated objects that would create the impression that someone had moved in. It was a mix of real life and mise en scene. There is also the more recent project presented at Contemporary Art Gallery. Let us then be up and doing with a heart for any fate still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait. Where I expected viewers to build a mental image of the whole exhibition. It started outside with windows filled with insulating fiberglass and once inside the gallery, viewers were led through a gloomy corridor and eventually found themselves confronted with this large structure made out of painted cardboard and duct tape. That large and complex structure was first designed on a 3D modeling software. Then each one of the 400 triangles were hand cut with high precision. Precision. I had hope. I was convinced that I could do it. The structure kept failing me. It would fall, collapse. The show was in a perpetual state of disintegration and it required constant attention. And at the heart of this thing, a large sculpture in the shape of a brilliant round cut diamond, all plexiglass. The whole sentiment of the show turned around failed hope and built environments in perpetual transformation. A sentiment accelerated by the viewer's navigation through the work. Art making is, in essence, hopeful. I often feel like there's a need to justify what I do. I know that I can keep that sense of justification down through academic show-off, exuberance or technical mastery. But this impression that I should deserve one's attention remains. So what does this mean? What does this mean? It means to me that there is a fundamental lack of trust toward the artist. This may only come from the fact that within any poetical attempt there may be potential for a scam and to some extent that self-expression is possibly an act of manipulation. For me, it's all about hope. And even more, it's about unconditional love. This quest for the fourth dimension led me to create polarizer. I conceived this exhibition like one would write a script. I wanted to create the impression that some terrible events had happened, and that tragedy was just around the corner. But I wanted to do it with the public's complicity. I wanted to put forward the idea of exhibition, not so much about my work and my single point of view, but about a more remote and global perspective. Therefore, I decided to approach this whole thing like a group exhibition with each work done in a different spirit. The entire gallery was reconfigured with new walls and corridors. The journey started with a map of the exhibition identifying the placement of all the work in the show but also of work that did not exist. There were also imaginary parts of the gallery that were added to the map. After that were three pieces that were echoing each other. In the first room were two large walls smashed with a fire extinguisher. And then one would go on to the next room to discover this backlit, trans-mounted photograph. Right after, one would find this room with broken mirror on the ground, a broom, and strobe light. For me, the main thing was to create a dialogue between the work using light and darkness as formal binding agents. From this room, the visitors could enter a 100 foot long corridor in complete darkness. Really. They would then emerge and face this large, burned out boat covered with light bulbs. The whole thing was like a nightmare. An exhibition gone wrong, terribly wrong. A bizarre series of tragedies and accidents badly staged. Things would not add up. It was uncanny, but without becoming over the top and that way justifying oddity, I guess I like the middle ground. But it's a hard place to be in. Just a little strange, but not strange enough to be called eccentric. That's where things express their full strength in plain view like that when they're unshielded. What I found difficult with presenting this show and that I find difficult today is to keep going with it and keeping it out of an easy description. And this is, I believe, where I'm going. Sometimes I regret my choices. I think to myself, you are full of shit. And then the next thing I think is just fine. Keep going, keep making stuff. On what basis should I regret these choices anyway? If art making is a long discussion that has begun thousands of years ago and where each artist is one more person trying to interject, trying to be heard and make a point, then I guess anybody would choose to scream instead of whisper. It comes down to a state of mind, I guess. What I do is that I try to think in between. Well, it's like not thinking at all. It's like I try to get my brain to freeze. Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. I try not to think about anything specifically. I try to let my mind go in the in-between of things to get to places that words create shadow on. It's a very difficult thing to do. But that's how I work. But can everything make sense? Can we give value to any thoughts for the simple reason that they exist? Lost thoughts are finally found back. Nothing blank forever. It's the title of a project I completed in 2012 at Langara College. I think that a good way to introduce this project is to read an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sarge's famous play, No Exit. It's a conversation between a valet and one character that found himself in hell. This scene takes place in the room where all characters are stranded. Valet, what are you talking about? Garcin, your eyelids. We move ours up and down. Blinking, we call it. It's like a small black shutter that clicks down and makes a break. Everything goes black. One's eyes are moistened. You can't imagine how restful it is. You can't imagine how refreshing it is. 4,000 little rests per hour. 4,000 little respites. Just think. So that's the idea. I'm to live without eyelids. Don't act the fool. You know what I mean. No eyelids, no sleep. It follows, doesn't it? I shall never sleep again. But then, how shall I endure my own company? Try to understand. You see, I'm fond of teasing. It's a second nature with me. And I'm used to teasing myself, plaguing myself, if you prefer. I don't tease nicely, but I can't go on doing that without a break. Down there, I had my nights. I slept. I always had good nights. By way of compensation, I suppose, and happy little dreams. There was a green field, just an ordinary field. I used to stroll in it. Is it daytime now? Can't you see? The lights are on. Ah, yes, I've got it. It's your daytime. And outside? Outside. Damn it, you know what I mean? Beyond that wall. The premise for Nothing Blank Forever is to conceive and present a public art project that would subscribe itself into the college's life. For this, I've created a movie studio. Basically, a space that's a production platform to shoot a movie in all aspects of that movie, music sets, costumes, etc. The space is being used as a theater for the presentation of the movie. I like to describe this project as a vertically integrated movie production. But the nature of the space goes beyond the fabrication of a feature movie by becoming also a gathering space, a drawing studio, a stage for a play. Michel Foucault coined the term heterotopia in 1967 in his text of other spaces. He refers to real spaces with ambiguous identity, enacting the role of utopias, parallel spaces simultaneously fictitious and real. I think that this project embraces this term in many ways. For instance, by offering a physical real space that exists under the ideological precepts attached to art. But mainly, the transient nature of the space resides in the fact that it is perpetually subject to diverging interpretation. One might look at it as a public forum when someone else sees it as a display case. The proposal was an absurd one and the main challenge here did reside in the type of movie I shot. I filmed in the studio from December until April 2012 asking art and theater students to perform. If I say that this proposal is absurd, it's because of the genre of movie I realized. A road movie. Well, a road movie shot in camera like Sartre's play. The main guideline for my script has been the well-known Zeno's dichotomy paradox. The pre-socratic Greek philosopher stipulates that an arrow shot by an archer will never meet its target because before reaching the target, it has to reach half of the distance. And that before reaching that half, it has to reach the half of the half of the distance and the half of the half of the half of that distance and so on forever. Never the arrow will leave its point of origin. It will be about an internal journey, motion through identity, minimal displacement. Another inspiration has been, for obvious reasons, the 1969 movie Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper. So I'd like to read a dialogue taken from the movie. It's a dialogue between George, the character interpreted by Jack Nicholson, and Billy, played by Dennis Hopper. George, you know, this used to be a hell of a good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it. Man, everybody got chicken. That's what happened, man. Hey, we can't even get into, like, a second-rate motel. I mean, a second-rate motel. You dig? They think we're going to cut their throat or something, man. They're scared, man. Oh, they're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent to them. Hey, man, all we represent to them, man, is somebody needs a haircut. Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom. What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what it's all about, all right. But talking about it and being it, that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, because then they're going to get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah. They're going to talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual is going to scare them. Well, that'll make them run and scared. No, it makes them dangerous. Art speak, 2012. I had a great trip despite a brutal feeling of cognitive dissonance. This is the elevation that I had in mind when planning the work, bench, hallway, gallery, building and city, each element fitting gracefully into the other like Russian dolls, like a story within a story or a snare hit and bass kick in a drum track. People would come in, walk through the hallway, see a door at some point. They would try to open it. The door is locked. Fuck it. People would keep going, ending up in the director's office. Wrong plays, obviously. They may exchange words on the occasion, not too many. Anyways, I asked them not to say too much, especially about the person living in there. The space came with full privacy. After some short conversation with the office's personnel, they would come back to the hallway, give the bench a good look and eventually notice the voiceover. What people didn't know at this point and might even never have found out is that someone was living on the other side of that wall. I rented the gallery to someone to live in there for one month, signing a lease agreement with this person and basically surrendering the gallery space to someone else for the duration of the show. So people would sit down, except the fact that there was little to look at, resign themselves and lend a near to what is broadcast. One would then be witnessing an internal monologue, choppy and elliptical, creating that feeling that one has when watching the urban landscape from the bus window. Things are scrolling in front of our eyes, irregular, impolite, contradicting each other, piled up to the point of randomness, but still embodying some unexpected definition of the absolute. These are things as they are. As rough as they are beautiful, collected and brutal. Obviously, the thoughts coming from the character are being expressed without sophistication, sketches in nature, elements that might, with good fortune, form a more accurate vision of things. I hired an actor to do the recording as a way to provide a distance necessary to the emergence of an actual character. This monologue should be heard as one possible interpretation of the person living on the other side of the wall getting intertwined with each individual interpretation constructed by each viewer. But maybe I can go even further and state that there is no monologue, but rather a dialogue between two people not acknowledging each other's presence. I found the tenant through the classifieds. The process wasn't too exhausting. And basically, once I found the person, I gave her full authority over most of the gallery space. I don't know how that space is being lived in, but the space is being occupied. I would think that very few people know. It's not that I want this space to be hidden to the public, even though it is, but rather that a public space become a space of intimacy, a space which is as real as it is fabulated. And because of a restriction of access, it may emerge as a sentiment of frustration or deception. Could this be revealing the viewer's own expectations? Entertain me! Charmoi! In the recorded monologue, my character goes on to say, this is not really what I had in mind. I thought it would be bigger, much bigger, something powerful, something strong, a life-changing kind of thing. I thought it would be more fun at least. This is nothing. This one is about clarity. The brittle edges of coherence. Everything about this work is clear and limpid. Not only can one notice every structural and superficial element, offering viewers the possibility to mentally re-enact the making of the piece, but the piece also aims at creating a telescopic effect, where the insertion of an object into another suggests a paradoxical ongoing instant. This is what I was looking for. Insoluble images, irreducible collages, and an anecdotal experience stuck on repeat forever, all dovetailed into one another. This type of endeavor sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. This one is okay. I like it. I like it because it's hard to explain or even justify, and it forced me to accept being in a weak position, possibly finding myself on the defensive. Working on this project has been strange from the beginning. Sometimes work starts as something strange and slowly maybe out of need of reassurance, strangeness evaporates, and things become sensical. This one is clear without being about one's capacity to understand. I know who cares. I like this one because it's me saying things will be this way. I have no real reason for this statement. I have no excuses, no defense. This is an engineered representation of my own vulnerability. It's me saying, look at what I just did. This is it. This is it. I'm here. I made the decisions. I took control of the situation. I chose everything. This is it. I'm not certain how long I'll be able to maintain this attitude, but so far so good. But it's getting tougher and tougher. Call it resistance. Please call it resistance. The organizers of the event and myself had a Skype meeting regarding this project. It was a new proposal as my initial proposal got turned down. I know. I initially proposed a six-hour-long performance starring Don McKellar. He had said yes and everything, but they turned it down for some reasons that I don't feel like explaining here tonight. We then talked about this project. I showed them some computer renderings. I could tell immediately that Gordon was happy. There it was, something big and tall that looked cool. Nobody could tell what this thing was about, but everybody was happy to see it and felt reassured by it. I just asked the event organizers to find me a normal-looking car, a small car, something bland, and they found me this Saturn. Gordon suggested that we use the minivan instead, as it turned out to be in much rougher shape. Nah. So I guess when I said that I chose everything, I was wrong. It felt like it, though. I take decisions over decisions, and then things happen. Things change around me. I flex, and then things change even more, and I flex some more. But it's still mine. It's still my idea. I wanted it, and I made it happen. There's this image of the Boeing 767 flying through a building, creating a plane-shaped hole. There is a wish to have two objects interlinked, as if a collision could result in the production of something distinctive and whole. There's a sub-Jason event here. There is a suggested collision. There is a story. There is a story. Let's go back. Clarity, decision-making, interfacing, and now a narrative. A sculpture can represent an event or embody one. If it does, it becomes a narrative, a succession of events, compressed in a singular and freestanding object. And let's not forget about the public space or the evocation of a public place with this bench and that canopy. People would sit here and hang out. I personally can't hang out with anybody. I can't stay still. I just need to do stuff. I'm not a hyperactive kind of guy. I'm just a normal guy, you know? Okay, clarity, decision-making, interfacing, narrative, and public space. Look at this. This is how I work. This is my studio. I would wake up and walk in the morning all the way to the site. Kitchener has a few pretty houses, just a few of them, a few nice streets with old houses and tall trees. My route was quite enjoyable. It went from ugly to beautiful to ugly again. It became a kind of meditative moment, a way for me to focus on the work that had to be done. Let's talk about a last project tonight, the one that is here now. I must say that this is not something that I would have initiated on my own. Melanie O'Brien originally invited me to create something around Simon Fraser University Gallery's collection. This first felt like a burden, like an invitation for dinner that can force you to state that you just loved some horrible dish. But there's no room here for complacency, and I wasn't going to let this invitation turn me into one little complacent brat. I decided to take full advantage of the situation and focus on the absoluteness of subjectivity. Randomness, haphazardness, subjectivity. These are all bad words. When artists are relying on such principles, they are apparently fooling themselves, following the path of least resistance and plainly admitting to the incapacity of taking control of a given situation. It's something even worse. Cheating. Subjectivity is weak and sentimentalist. Subjectivity is for losers. Rigor, pragmatism, consistency. These are the shit. About a year ago I wrote this short text about my installation, the creation of not a new world, just an old trick, led me through a breadth of emotions and questionings, working from the collection represented unexpected challenges. How could I bear witness to the crystallization process of the constitution of a 28,000 piece collection represents? Approaches could be multiple, but one main wish remained, to present the gallery space as a site of synchronization and not so much as a site of hierarchization. Not everything speaks equally, but all ideas can be presented at once in a chorus of concepts, ideological standpoints and conclusions. Building from that premise I suggest that an overarching image can be produced from the reunion of aesthetic positions and that a new discursive fabric can therefore be woven. The questioning, this questioning of value, importance and strength is of high interest to me. But how one should go about it, how can you at once critique and take action in the world? This question is central to this exhibition as I'm specifically interested in bringing the viewer through a succession of roles and positions from a rather classic and passive spectator to the semi-dynamic position of flanneur to the role of a discoverer, etc. These different phases contribute to the understanding of the piece as a narrative structure, the opportunity to define for themselves the role of the viewer and ultimately the role of a citizen. Ultimately this work was selected freely selecting pieces from a distance gauging my subjectivity against the collections itself. It's not an act of fairness. Decisions were mostly taken spontaneously but this I believe doesn't take away their capacity to resonate, quite to the contrary. Seeing Lin Cohen's uncanny photograph who clearly influenced my work sitting next to a boas-hunt blue sweatshirt just, well, it makes sense to me. That's just how things should be. Form, history, anecdotes and improvisation. The project is now traveling presently on display at Carlton University Art Gallery and will be shown at Oakville Galleries this March. And each iteration brings something new dwelling on the nature of each specific collection but also responding to each exhibition space's volumetric capacity and architectural characteristics. The structure itself is growing, becoming better and better each time. Yes, better and better. There's always room for improvement. I can't conceal the multiple references formal and intellectual to the modern ideal. Why would I? Philip Oswald, director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation describes the Bauhaus building itself this way. The building also represents a new kind of synthesis. It not only unites all the design disciplines but also every dimension of the human existence, learning, research, production, partying, eating, sleeping, activity, affections, presentations, etc. Everything that the Bauhaus community needs to live and work is brought together in this building. Go ahead, call me a dreamer. This piece, like the previous one, is a collage, an amalgam of spaces, sites, objects, and situations. Any of these sites, objects, situations exploded then later subjectively and carefully joined to create a new and indivisible image. Rigor, pragmatism, consistency. This work is as much an acknowledgement of my own divided and obscured experience of the world as it is a celebration of an improbable and uncanny accumulation of visions and perceptions. This is about the familiar, the mundane, and the vernacular. This is a salutation to one's motion through the built environment when facing the constant and terrifying challenge of constructing a consistent mental image of the world. I wish I could say more about this work. Maybe I can add that I wish that the viewer understood that there is no subject in this work anymore if not for the viewer itself. That there are no intentions if not for all of them at once. That there is no beauty if not for all the beauty of the world at once. I think I've said enough. I think that's it. It's now time to part ways. I had a great time and I really hope you did too. We'll see each other at some point. I'm pretty sure about it. For reasons that at this point should seem obvious, I will not take any questions. I'm sorry, it would be nonetheless interesting to have the discussion going, so please feel free to talk about all you have just seen or about anything else that matters to you. Good evening.