"Brooklyn/Montreal Exchange" Exhibition
Momenta Art
This event has ended.
Posse Comitatus is an ongoing collaboration between Mark Tribe and Chelsea Knight, two artists whose work explores the intersection of performance and politics. In 2011 Knight and Tribe set out to investigate the American militia movement, a wide network of paramilitary groups that arose in the United States the 1990s, organized around ideologies of survivalism and political extremism. Knight and Tribe developed a relationship with a militia group in Upstate New York that focused in particular on preparedness in the event of a government breakdown. The group, consisting of ex-army soldiers and gun enthusiasts, allowed the artists to film their training exercises, tactical drills and paramilitary maneuvers. The artists then worked with a choreographer in St. Louis to create a dance performance in September 2012 based on their militia footage.
Posse Comitatus is a Latin term that means “force of the county.” Historically, the term has been used to refer to the common law authority of a county sheriff to summon a group of citizens (a “posse”) to enforce the law. In the context of the contemporary militia movement, it conveys to the idea that citizens have an inalienable right to defend themselves against tyranny, even if that means taking up arms against the state.
Embracing sound, image, and text, Sébastien Cliche’s creative work employs narrative to broach our ambiguous rapport with security and the defense mechanisms that govern our social relationships. In this installation, projected diagrams—architectural plans, network topologies—lead us into mazes reminiscent of Franz Kafka's The Castle, from which the artist drew freely for inspiration. The diagrams refer to public places—a cathedral, an auditorium, a prison, a palace, etc.—that are randomly superposed to form a hybrid, constantly changing space. Each animated sequence also triggers a sound fragment—real archival recordings—creating a non-linear narrative that comes together and unravels by turns.
In this work, as in the novel, the castle motif remains elusive since it is only revealed to us through partial, subjective reflections. Relying on the multiplicity of points of view, the narrative testifies to the complexity of human relationships, which Cliche develops into a structural metaphor where people’s perceptions are affected by their motivations.
The inhabited quality of the installation soundtrack contrasts with the cold, diagrammatic lines we are given to see. The interval between these two representations lies fully in the spectator’s purview, who must weave his or her own causal, semantic, and narrative relationships.
The artist would like to thank the ARC PHONO research group for the use of their phonographic archives.
In her interdisciplinary practice, Sylvie Cotton draws inspiration from the situations existence affords and transposes them onto the art field. The artist works upon the real, upon representation, favoring immaterial forms that include presence, identity, energy, exchange, and self-abandon, while her modes of dissemination are modeled on the gift, on bustling activity, on the collection. Notions of alterity criss-cross her works, where performance, action art, drawing, painting are all a conduit between identity and the body social.
The posited action is never isolated from context and uses; it approaches the exhibition space as an extension of the workshop, as an intimate place; autobiographical material reinforces this impression. The works she brings into the gallery question the foundations of artistic practice: the creative process, critical judgment, reception of the work. Cotton brings to our attention the conditions and circumstances that shape our perception of art, whether by inviting the audience to determine the work’s destiny by following a precise though aleatory protocol (Instrument à dessiner, 2012) or through a textual utterance expressing an existential angst and linguistic duality (Confidence/Confidence, 2012). In the art world the artist presents us with, the act of consuming is an inherent reality; she produces derivative products that require the audience’s complicity and that imply both duration in the work’s appreciation (Art, 2012) and the ephemerality of the devices employed.
Media
Schedule
from January 11, 2013 to February 17, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-01-13 from 18:00 to 21:00