LIKE NOTHING, FIGURE DE RIEN

a collaborative exhibition by Raymond Lavoie + Martha Townsend

The exhibition runs from January 17 to February 23, 2002.
A publication accompanies the exhibition.

... at the bottom was something mysterious, a shape and no moreÉ A great enormous thing, like – like nothing. A huge, big – well, like, like a – I don't know – like an enormous big nothing. Like a jar...

(From Piglet Meets a Heffalump by A.A. Milne)

As part of a collaborative series begun in 1997 with the idea of promoting fertile encounters between artists of different outlooks, Dazibao has asked Raymond Lavoie and Martha Townsend to work together on an exhibition and publication project. Although their work is imbued with a minimalist aesthetic, both artists propose a socio-poetic approach to form.

Fascinated by the generic image and its waste, often its own doing, Raymond Lavoie puts forward a quest for the absolute through emptiness, absence and deterioration. Using photographic and numeric images of vacant interiors and architectural facades, he plays with a convergence of surface, image and site, layering and compressing them into a single translucent plane.

Martha Townsend offers sublimated forms whose intricate and accomplished embodiment aim at a representation of nothingness. The densely black shapes of her graphite drawings are suggestive of holes of infinite depth. Grouped together, these spheres, circles and simple organic shapes, that are the visual vocabulary of her work, comprise a vast array of absences.

It is within this search for a minimal yet resonating form, where meanings and senses are somehow condensed, that the practices of Raymond Lavoie and Martha Townsend intersect. The artists have agreed to call this formal approach compression.

Raymond Lavoie lives and works in Montréal where he was born in 1950. Since 1985, he has been teaching at the École des arts visuels et mŽdiatiques of Université du Québec à Montréal. After receiving a B.A. from Université Laval, he completed an M.F.A. at Université du Québec à Montréal. His work has since been presented in Canada as well as Europe in solo and group exhibitions. In Montréal, Galerie Treize, Galerie Graff, the Montréal Télégraphe and the Galerie de lĠUniversité du Québec à MontrŽal have been regular presenters. Raymond Lavoie's work has been part of two significant travelling exhibitions organised by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal: Les temps chauds (1988), which circulated across Canada and Europe for over two years, and Legs René Payant (1992),which circulated across Canada. He also participated in several group exhibitions, among them Aspects de la peinture montréalaise actuelle, Québec Pavilion, Man and His World, Montréal (1982), The Quebec Connection, Harbourfront Art Gallery, Toronto (1988), L'Histoire et la mémoire, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (1989), Montréal 1942-1992 – L'Anarchie resplendissante de la peinture, Galerie de l'Université du Québec à Montréal (1992), La décennie de la métamorphose, Musée du Québec, Québec City (1992), Les lieux incertains, Galerie de l'Université du Québec à Montréal (1995), Autour de la mémoire et de l'archive, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (1999), and Figures, Art Paris, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris (2001).

Martha Townsend was born in Ottawa in 1956. After graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1978, she lived in Montréal, where she developed her art practice and taught at Concordia University until 1991. She now lives and works in New York City. Townsend's work has been exhibited extensively across Canada and in Europe. Solo exhibitions include Entre le silence et l'écoute, Musée d'art de Joliette (1995) and exhibitions at Costin & Klintwork Gallery, Toronto (1993), Art 45, Montréal (1990, 1987), Mercer Union, Toronto (1989), YYZ Artists Outlet, Toronto (1986), and Galerie Powerhouse/La Centrale, Montréal (1985). She has also produced several siteworks in various locations including MAWA in Winnipeg (1997), the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (1992), Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver (1990), and La Chasse-galerie, in Strokestown House, Ireland (1989). Her work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions, notably in Revolve, the Edmonton Art Gallery (2001), The Very Thing, Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax (2000), The Impossible, Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London, England (1998), Objects in Advance of the Concept, Burnaby Art Gallery (1995), Contingent, Mount St. Vincent University Gallery, Halifax (1995), L'Origine des choses, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (1994), Diagonales Montréal, Centre international d'art contemporain, Montréal (1992), Art actuel. Présences québécoises, Château de Biron and La Ferme du Buisson, France (1992), Toward a History of the Found Object, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon (1990).