Olivia Boudreau creates an intimate interchange in her work between representation and the viewer in order to put their perception of time to test, in time. The moving images Boudreau uses, despite essentially being based in their form on photographic principles such as composition, light, colour and an attention to framing, push the sensation and unfolding of duration to its paroxysm. Her images, with their exacerbated inertia, enquire not only into our relationship to time but also, more subtly, into the body’s experience and its intimate depiction in images which has an animal-like quality that is not without eroticism.

This exhibition presents two long-lasting video works. For Box, Olivia Boudreau filmed 23 hours in a stall. In La Levée, we make out in the darkness the bottom moulding of a wall and a pair of legs, along which slide a woman’s panties. Each of the boxes in the present exhibition reveals a creature out of which develop prolific imaginary connections: a horse, a young woman. Between these works and their viewer arises a game, a movement between what is shown and is not, between the powerful symbolic charge of the image and the impossibility of grasping it completely while the image lasts. It is in this hollow space, in this state of latency, that the viewer fashions his or her own cinema.

Olivia Boudreau is a performance and video artist. Her work has drawn attention in several recent exhibitions, including at Optica, the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, the SBC Gallery and the Galerie de l’UQAM. She holds a Master’s degree in visual and media arts from UQAM, where she was a recipient of the Pierre Amyot grant, and is currently carrying out a creative residency at the Darling Foundry. She lives and works in Montreal.

The artist would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, as well as Isabelle Boudreau for her stable, horses, collaboration and generosity. She would also like to thank all of those who gave their time for this project’s success, especially Marie-Andrée for her energy and wise advice and Luc for his useful Magic Arm and, above all, his support and his comforting presence. And finally thanks to Clyde, the magnificient beast at the core of the exhibition.

Dazibao thanks the artist, the MONTREAL HIGH LIGHTS Festival and the Nuit blanche à Montréal for their generous collaboration and its members for their support.
Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.