Solo (2003) is a video exhibited as a video/sound installation depicting shots of drum, voice, guitar, clavier/synthesizer, and a melodica player cut into segmented fragments from the perspective of a studio recording set. Rather than deploying a narrative strategy, Grandmaison focuses on the gestures of the musicians and the repetitions they carry out when recording their individual tracks. The musicians are portrayed nodding, dancing, improvising, strumming, creating resonance that is repeated over and over– however, Grandmaison is sure not to document their entire faces or expressions while they perform, just details. Similar to that of a “jam,” close attention is granted to the exertion of the camera and how it portrays the framing of sequences. What one can pick up from the segments, especially those of voice recording, is a modified reworking of Anne Clark’s 1980’s track “Sleeper in the Metropolis.”
Marked by an apparent austerity and meticulousness, Pascal Grandmaison’s works display a disconcerting aloofness from the world, a clearly asserted detachment from reality. The subjects that interest the artist primarily deal with the means by which humans try to grasp their world, both visually and intellectually. The artist employs photography, video, and sculpture in order to compose a vision of what some have termed “troubling strangeness.” Overturning conventional codes of visual analysis, Grandmaison focuses on inanimate subjects that, once disassociated from their familiar environment, are re-contextualized through his cold gaze. His depictions do not exist as stories instead he reverses viewpoints and inverts color codes. His photographs and video works are generally black and white, giving them a monotone feel. A constant visual repetition in his work is his rigorously impersonal gaze. As a keen observer, he meticulously scrutinizes the world around him, analyzing it through the lens of a camera. Grandmaison is interested in the appearance of things and non-beings and, more rarely, of beings themselves. When human figures do appear in his work, they are presented in an inexpressive, impassive, distant way, equated to the role of an object. Pascal Grandmaison was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1975.
Women Are the Post-Apocalyptic Future Skip to content Dana Schutz, "Civil Planning" (2004), oil on canvas (all photos Ela Bittencourt/ Hyperallergic ) BERLIN and PARIS — In recent years, impending ecological apocalypse has spurred a number of contemporary artists to visualize fears of an environmental collapse...
Expand, Exchange, and Beyond: A reflection of the Asian Arts Media Roundtable 2021 at SIFA | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints June 9, 2021 By Gladhys Elliona It was a laid-back day at the end of April, when I got the email from ArtsEquator informing me that I had gotten into the Asian Arts Media Roundtable (AAMR) at the Singapore International Festival of Arts 2021...
Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes...
Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994)...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...