D'ELLES

A special collaborative work by Loly Darcel & Lorraine Oades
The exhibition runs from December 2, 1999 to January 30, 2000.
A publication complete the installation.

This project, a book and an installation, expresses the complicity of two individual art practices. D'elles is, first and foremost the meeting between Loly Darcel and Lorraine Oades, one marked by the presence of the women who inhabit this collaborative work. D'elles enacts a shift toward the space of the other, an investigation of social and cultural environment which fashions our understanding and way-of-being in the world.
Loly Darcel's practice borrows from photo installation, performance art and writing, and has led her to an exploration of the question of audience as co-author, an approach which alters the perception of identity. Her interventions require this collaboration and trust in order that, though ephemeral, the work may exist and operate in a living environment not connected with art spaces. Using site as a matter, the artist reinscribes personnal and collective stories with and within the architecture of public and private spaces. Lorraine Oades is known for her portraits of women and for the social nature of her work. Her installations identify a need to continually recreate a social history that reflects the contributions and needs of those traditionally excluded from its. These works are quietly aesthetized spaces that call upon the sensuality and muteness of materials, in combination with text and sound, to articulate the trajectory of another history and provide a literal space in which the other voices may reside.
Dazibao asked these two artist to work together in a common project. Beyond the combination of two distinct voices, it is a third voice, new to both artists that emanates from D'elles.

Loly Darcel lives and works in Montréal. Her works integrate not just photography, video, installation and performance, but also ephemeral objects, for the way they affirm the temporality and the transitory nature of all things. Several of her projects intervene directly in the life of the place where they occur: in residencies (Studio Cormier, Quai de Rohan), or in the occupation of an abandoned building (Boulevard, de l'effacé). Even her public art works are closely linked to the site of their production. Above all, the works of Loly Darcel focus on the relationship with the Other, which she considers fundamental to defining her own identity.

Lorraine Oades lives and works in Montréal. Her work bridges a range of disciplinary practices that includes photography, video, sound, sculpture, painting, and new media. She graduated from the Interdisciplinary Programme at Emily Carr College of Art and Design and completed her MFA at Concordia University. Her art production involves a commitment to object making and is informed by a first hand relationship to a material practice. She has taught sculpture and interdisciplinary courses at a number of institutions including Bishop's University, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and Queen's University. Currently she is teaching at Concordia University.