Patrick Beaulieu
for intérieur – braise 4
2012

Name: for intérieur – braise 4
Brand: Patrick Beaulieu
Price: 6000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Patrick Beaulieu’s multi-disciplined practice creates finely tuned and subtle gestures that aim to re-focus our attention on the physical world that we see and experience. In conversation with a trilogy of on-the-road Odysseys that he will be completing in 2012 with Daniel Canty, Beaulieu brings together natural and manmade remnants from his personal expeditions, breaking down their perceived differences along the way. For intérieur (Deep Down), pays homage to things that once lived, bled, smoldered, and buzzed. Through flat images and installations, a host of natural histories occupy the gallery space in varying size, height, movement, and volume. Portable scanners capture high-resolution images of bloodstained goose feathers, each one given special attention in the center of the scan. These small particles of flight and migration – collected from the forest floor – leave plenty of questions about their former host body unanswered, but float between life and death as independent forms. Forty migratory geese wings, cast in aluminum, seem to quiver above hundreds of programmed LEDs positioned on the gallery floor. Like the bloody spots on the scanned images, the metal coating re-defines the feathers, presumably once supported by life and air. And still the glow of red light seems to whisper a path for continuation. Digital prints of glowing embers freeze the final moment before the scanner explodes from the intense heat of the dying coal. But the show’s smallest installation is perhaps its most powerful. A tiny, black and blue night fly buzzes in tight rotation, audibly hitting the gallery wall again and again during the course of its self-destructive orbit. As with Beaulieu’s Braises, a switch is flipped on, and life is gently pushed back into the process of burning out. The varying elements in Beaulieu’s work are lively, but running throughout you can feel a tension with the absence of life. The missing connections between these fragments and their original energy source are as notable as the images and objects themselves. Cast, scanned, and re-charged, For intérieur shimmers between burial and flight. With this in mind, Beaulieu delivers quiet, intense glimpses that tune in to the rhythmic pulse of life just as they acknowledge its limits, as well as our own. Representations and the tools that make them have their own boundaries. So do we. But by capturing these small, forgotten traces, Beaulieu asks us to reexamine our own vista, and perhaps open our eyes a bit wider.

Creator:

Patrick Beaulieu (1974, Canadian)

Creation Year:

2012

Dimensions:

Height: 58 in (147.32 cm)Width: 42.5 in (107.95 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)

Medium:

Photographic Paper

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

21st Century

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Montreal, CA

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU476235612

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Patrick Beaulieu

Patrick Beaulieu is a multidisciplinary artist. His projects are intrinsically linked to ideas of mobility, forming a relationship to various territories by empirically addressing the question of geographical and social boundaries, and the boundary between reality and fiction. His interest in the journey and its inherent narrative has led him to focus on some of the elusive phenomena that surround us (migratory, meteorological, spiritual…), and the forces that act upon these. He has produced several bodies of work in the form of installations, videos, sculptures, photography, performances, in-situ/in-socius interventions and archives. Over the last dozen years, he has built his practice around performative excursions across North America, Europe and Asia. In 2013, Beaulieu completed a trilogy of transfrontier odysseys titled VVV, in collaboration with writers, geographers and philosophers. Together, they followed the migratory path of the monarch butterfly (Vecteur Monarque, 2007); chased the winds across America in a 25-day continental navigation (Ventury, 2010) and surrendered themselves to fate and luck on the roads of chance (Vegas, 2012). In the summer of 2014, Beaulieu embarked on a slow, month-long, meandering drift via kayak down the winding rivers that lead from southern Québec to the Atlantic Ocean, at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York (Meander). His work has been presented in several countries, most notably in solo exhibitions in the United States (Pacific Sky Exhibition); in Mexico (Centro de la Imagen), in Belgium (Experimental Intermedia), in Singapore (Plastique Kinetic Worms Art Centre Kinetic Worms Art Centre), and across Canada, including the Banff New Media Institute, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the Centre Clark, the Centre d’exposition CIRCA, the Musée de Lachine, the Galerie des arts visuels de l’Université Laval, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Sherbrooke. His work is included in numerous public and private collections in Canada, the US, France and Mexico. Beaulieu has also produced many public art projects in the form of performative or relational interventions, or as permanent public art installations within architectural and landscaped environments.