LIKE NOTHING, FIGURE DE RIEN

Artists: Raymond Lavoie et Martha Townsend

2002, 32 pages, $12.60, ISBN: 978-2-922135-15-2

As part of this collaborative series begun in 1997, and again 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 æsthetics, both artists propose a socio-poetic approach to form. Fascinated by the generic image and its waste, often its own doing, Lavoie puts forward a quest for the absolute through emptiness, absence and deterioration. As for Martha Townsend, she offers sublimated forms whose quite intricate and accomplished embodiment however aim at a representation of nothingness.

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.

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