Lucie Chan and Jérôme Havre: Liminal

L i m i nal Lucie Chan Jérôme Havre

liminal

Lucie Chan Jérôme Havre Curated by Pamela Edmonds The Robert McLaughlin Gallery

Contents

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Foreword and Acknowledgements Donna Raetsen-Kemp

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Grey Areas: Lucie Chan and Jérôme Havre’s Poetics of (Dis)Placement Pamela Edmonds

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“We, the masters, are not home.”: Between Provenance and Endings, Liminality Ricky Varghese

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Exhibition Works List

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Biographies

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Artists’ and Curator’s Acknowledgements

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Foreword and Acknowledgements Liminality, that space between. Liminal, the exhibition that brings together the experiences, both personal and universal, of artists Lucie Chan and Jérôme Havre who continue to navigate that space, the “third space” as curator Pamela Edmonds explains in her essay. As the world experiences an ever-increasing shift in migration for reasons ranging from economic and geopolitical to cultural and social, the resulting diasporic communities begin to meld, to create “hybrids”, new spaces exist where old ones have vanished and this exhibition, through its thoughtful and dynamic installations, explores these environments.

I would like to thank Pamela Edmonds for being open to curating an exhibition for the RMG and suggesting a topic so appropriate to our times. Her essay is illuminating and thoughtful, assisting us in understanding the complexities of a world in flux, now so much more obvious as we

see the daily struggles of people moving across borders seeking safety. Lucie Chan and Jérôme Havre have constructed installations in which their individual voices are strengthened by their association. We thank them for sharing their work with us. Essay contributor Ricky Varghese brings forward existential questions about the liminal as a space “the very threshold of the experience of being.” His words have enriched this publication for which we are grateful. For the beautiful design of this catalogue, I would like to thank Atanas Bozdarov.

The RMG Curatorial staff have risen to the various challenges characteristic of a complex project such as Liminal.

I would like to thank Senior Curator, Linda Jansma, Associate Curator, Sonya Jones, Preparator, Jason Dankel and our dedicated volunteers: Brendan Coughlin, Ann Boutchko, Mike Drolet, Alex Hutchinson, and Natalie Rawe.

Our funders make projects such as Liminal possible. To that end I would like to thank the City of Oshawa, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their continued support.

Donna Raetsen-Kemp Chief Executive Officer, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery 11

lucie chan LoFoSto

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lucie chan Take Me Back

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lucie chan Poem For Taxi Drivers

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Jérôme Havre Nécessité et Accident

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Grey Areas: Lucie Chan and Jérôme Havre’s Poetics of (Dis)Placement Pamela Edmonds

The story never stops beginning or ending. It appears headless and bottomless for it is built on differences. Its (in)finitude subverts every notion of completeness and its frame remains a non-totalizable one. The differences it brings about are differences not only in structure, in the play of structures and of surfaces, but also in timbre and in silence. We—you and me, she and he, we and they—we differ...in the choice and mixing of utterances, the ethos, the tones, the paces, the cuts, the pauses. The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess.

A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits.

Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness.

—Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other

Neither one thing nor another; or maybe both; or neither here nor there: may even be nowhere...and at the very least ‘betwixt and between.’

—Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols

Arriving from two different but similar directions, the words of anthropologist Victor Turner and filmmaker Trinh T. MinhHa evoke the conditions of liminality, the juncture where the known and unknown meet in strange territories and unfamiliar spaces. Our current moment could be said to be characterised by these thresholds, sparked by increased mobility, travel and communication technologies. The question of what it means to identify with and have a sense of belonging to a particular place or locality has greater complexity in an increasingly globalised world.

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In his “Altermodern Manifesto” curator Nicolas Bourriaud describes how new global identities have spurned a type of representation reflective of transnational entities and chaotic journeys. Artists who embrace these global identities, he suggests, “translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history.” A reaction against cultural standardism and commercialism, their art, Bourriaud claims, has its roots in the cross-cultural idea of “otherness” and “creolization.“ Similarly, in The Location of Culture, post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha speaks of the borderline work of culture as one that is not part of the continuum of past and present, but one that is created anew as an “insurgent act of cultural translation”(7). Hybrid cultures created by migrant diasporic communities exist because there is a “third space” of enunciation’, an ‘in-between space’, where cultural and historic milieus and meanings can be appropriated, translated and refigured. It is through the concept of liminality, a dialectic interaction between things—objects, subjects and spaces—and transient states of being, where the some of the most productive possibilities for articulations of culture are located and negotiated.

Addressing questions of liminality and space, this exhibition brings together contemporary artists Lucie Chan and Jérôme Havre whose respective

practices take up the visual and spatial imaginary of multi-media installation, their work embracing “in-between” spaces of ambiguity and cultural hybridization.

Translating the experience of boundaries across materials and practices, both artists create imaginary, dream-like worlds that defy and unsettle fixed significations.

Though quite different in form and effect— Chan’s fragile, ephemeral figure-based drawings merge personal and strangers’ stories of cultural loss, whereas Havre’s disorientating multimedia installations stage jarring cultural collisions—they are equally concerned with territory, borders and transitional spaces, whether historical, political, geographical, cultural, and how they are colonized, altered and traversed.

Through a “cut and mix” aesthetic that includes collage, bricolage and assemblage, the artists’ process-based works reflect a fragmentary poetics of displacement that map a “grey area” and which speaks to a condition of indeterminacy and openness, that plays with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarizes them. bell hooks speaks on the radical openness of this type of margin, as a space to resist the hegemonic powers of the centre, a position to imagine new geographies and new communities.

Here she posits: “Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice.” (153–159) 65

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Lucie Chan investigates drawing’s relations to liminal space through installation, assembling multi-figure ink and watercolour drawings, collages, animations and cut paper works into composite constructions that rely on an intimate engagement between subjects and viewers. These enigmatic, dream-like worlds are populated by abstracted figures caught between metaphysical states and complex social truths. Inspired by autobiographical reflections and real-life stories informed by the artist’s conversations with individuals (often strangers) from diverse immigrant communities in various locales, Chan uses portraiture as a trace, a diaristic record of temporary intercultural encounters. Drawn from memory as well as the imagination, transparent, dissolving silhouettes float through these ephemeral figures, multiple portraits morph into ambiguous, almost abject bodies that are formed by an amalgamation of disconnected anatomies that echo a sense of detachment and inaccessibility.

This exhibition of works on paper features three earlier installations and a new series of drawings, photocopied and presented as a bookwork in the gallery space. Created specifically for this exhibition, these small black ink wash works on paper chronicle a visual diary of Chan’s recollected experiences between dreams and daily life.

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Here, the public is given the opportunity to receive an original drawing in exchange for a short personal narrative to be written on the page next to the image. While providing a means of artistic and personal inspiration, the power of memory is for Chan grounded in the way it is shared.

Poem for Taxi Drivers (2013) was inspired by the artist’s travels back and forth between airports, an ode to the individual taxi drivers whom Chan engaged in conversations during evening trips.

Created in subtly shimmering tones of blue and purple ink, these mobile narratives are recorded as abstracted works on cut paper fashioned into angular coloured shapes. She selected a line from the stories of each of seven different drivers and created a poem that works as a collective portrait. The ambiguous imagery does not reveal an easy narrative however, just like the driver’s seat of a taxicab is a life in constant motion, a life often chosen by people who more often than not have uprooted themselves to navigate a new country. In an age dominated by digital imagery and mass media, Chan’s laboriously-drawn images attach importance to the physicality of the human touch, their tactile quality carrying a sense of intimacy. She explains: “I chose simple every day but meaningful thoughts and monumentalized the poem into visuals that felt like night, that felt like being driven through an unclear space, and yet felt like an exchange beyond what was expected...

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Viewers are meant to come closer, to see the tedious mark-making, to discover the words and make an effort to understand what is being said.”

LoFoSto (2009) short for “Longing for Stories” also suggests an intangible language and the desire to create meaning through collective narratives. This installation was inspired by the artist’s discussions with three women of Asian descent living in Montreal who were asked about their unique and idealized perceptions of “Asianess.” Chan, who was born in Guyana, raised in Alberta and currently resides in Vancouver, explains that the idea for the work emerged out of having to explain her multi-racial ethnicity to strangers, raising questions around the tangibility of situating herself within the idea of a monolithic culture.

Three video projections illuminate each woman’s personal perspectives, revealed in slow-moving black and white stop-motion animations which are projected as enigmatic circular portals.

These are surrounded by hundreds of watercolour and ink drawings of cut paper which Chan has painstakingly pinned in fluid movements across the gallery walls. The red drawings stand in for the artist’s interpretation of an imagined utopia, including imagery of people sharing meals, in group embraces and partaking in ritualized events. As each narrational position combines and recombines with others, the viewer is

empowered to question and decipher the interrelationships between the layers.

Chan implies the presence of people who are at once corporeal and phantom, familiar and unknown. At times she combines others facial features with her own self-portrait, melding images together, testing the boundaries between self and other, body and image, inviting multiple layers of meaning and interpretation.

Take Me Back (Onde Eu Pertn o) (2015) explores the notion of transportable identity and speaks of connections to liminal places between home and nothome. Along with the idea of memory, Chan’s work engages in a process of reinterpretation and recycling. She will often draw over sketches or cut up earlier exhibited works in order to demonstrate both the actual process of drawing, as well as shifts in her own ideas and understandings of the work.

This installation began with the artist’s ongoing documentation during a one month residency in a small rural village in Portugal. She created intimate, small format ink wash drawings, sketch-like compositions that recorded the landscape, people and various encounters in multiple scenes, evincing a storyboard type format but without a centralizing narrative. These drawings were given away to members of the community after the residency, though Chan continued to draw from memory during her return travel to Canada and once back home. Her recorded memories

became increasingly entangled with the mundane routines of her daily life in the city, merging the disparate imagery into complex compositions that suggest an unbounded place and time. The small drawings are collaged into four largescale mixed media works which hang suspended within the gallery space.

These collages reflect a chaotic visual diary of contemporary life, while the mysterious enlarged figures existing in their own indefinite space, standing in as personal reminders of time spent away. She explains: “The three things that stood out for me were: a woman I met who showed me the scar of where her left breast used to be; the effect my presence had on the residency farm animals, specifically the chickens; and the women who gardened in the tiny village where the residency was located.”

Together the works evoke a liminal space of betweenness and transition, where internal and external worlds, here and there, past and present, intersect.

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Jérôme Havre also explores intercultural encounters in his multidisciplinary practice that transforms conventional “white cube” gallery spaces into absorbing and disorientating environments. The Parisian-born, Torontobased artist combines various media including sculpture, textiles, digital prints, photography and wall painting to create immersive scenographic installations that explore questions of nationalism and nature, reflecting on themes of identity and the politics of representation.

Havre also builds his installations around a series of dialogues and tensions between material, form, colour and space, his past work often incorporating anthropomorphic, hybridized sculptural objects that deconstruct perceptions of race and colonization and which allude to ethnographic displays such as natural history dioramas in museums and zoos.

Working in-situ, Havre’s performative, process-orientated approach to the arrangement of elements destabilizes the familiar division between inside and outside, nature and culture, local and global, strange and familiar. For Nécessité et Accident, Havre invites the public to navigate a viscerally-charged alternate world, fashioned from both constructed and found objects. There is a clear Dadaist precedent for Havre’s conceptualist 71

approach, which turns to chance and contingency to construct an experimental space of liminal possibility. Space and objects here are hybridized, shifting in meaning and purpose, while visual and cognitive juxtapositions play with perceptions between image and appearance.

The use of accident challenges the authority of the artist and questions the function of art to discover order and necessity in a seemingly irrational world.

Havre’s art is an invitation to release our cognitive comforts and to revel in the discord of his disquieting installation, to become active and imaginative participants in the creation of meaning.

He questions the rarified position of the institutionalized art object by creating hybrid works that juxtapose, obscure and transform differing elements—there are dialogues between African culture and Western art history, allusions to ancient, modernist and post-modernist art and architecture, manipulated printed matter including travel journals, photographic images of nature made artificial, flags as permeable screens, swirling orbits of light, which together evoke a placeless, alternate universe.

Containers that carry art are given a different function, turned into forms that can be read for multiple meanings—as minimalist sculpture, as signifiers of movement and transport, their shape and form alluding to modernist architecture

and cityscapes. These opaque objects and the surrounding walls are immersed in the neutrality of dark grey, acting as a blank space on which narratives can be imagined and re-defined. Grey can be further read as representative of a liminal state. After completing a series of monochrome grey paintings in the 1970’s which expressed his resistance to modernist ideologies, artist Gerhard Richter aptly observed: “Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make ‘nothing’ visible.” (92) The result in Havre’s Nécessité et Accident is free association, here the viewer is in charge of making meaning, rupturing the link between art and the artist as authority or controlled decision maker. In a nod to French artist Marcel Duchamp, Havre assigned the creation of several wooden sculptures to a carpenter, these “semiready mades” were then painted with the help of gallery volunteers, similarly, the storage crates in this maze-like bricolage were sourced from the vaults of the RMG. The concept of a world without a master narrative is compelling, where differing objects come together and co-exist but are emptied of meaning, where the origin is not the end of the story.

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Where do I come from? W magination” which determines a glo Both Chan and Havre shun simplistic consciousness, where e myths of origin and authenticity with simultane world indoanintimacy bothWhere Where I come from? am works that lend themselves to an interrofamiliarWho and am profoundly feared –Who dea going?

I in the world? gation of current constructions of art and of identity, identification, Iquestions to the world?

These are perhaps so its potential to make new subjects and intimacy both simultaneously famil of the questions that most immedia relations in an ever-increasingly globalized profoundlyone’s feared – dealand with quest preoccupy critical psychic world. Art historian Marsha Meskimmon acumen, that most intimately an of identity, identification, and -recog suggests that there is a “cosmopolitan intimacy boththe simultaneously familiI that of both self and the other. imagination” which determines a global particularlyfeared arresting passage from profoundly – deal with questi consciousness, where every person is a essay on Marcel Proust’sand magnum of identity, identification, recogno world in and of themselves, where art In Search of Lost Time, Walter BenjaIn that of both the self and the other. serves as a mediator between the global describes Proust’s own technique, particularly arresting passage from sh and the diversity of self. Identity is never speak,on when it came to understandi essay Marcel Proust’s magnum o fixed to a certain place, or territory, nor is it In Search of Lost Time, very experience of theWalter latter’sBenjam own l interpreted by means of art. She writes: describes Proust’s own technique, neurotically, obsessively recorded so b speak, when it came understandin surreptitiously, in thetocontext of the Imagining ourselves at home in the world, where our homes are not fixed very the strange latter’s own li workexperience itself – thisoflife’s capac objects but processed of material and conceptual engagement with other neurotically, by to be both atobsessively home in therecorded world and people and different places, is the first step toward becoming cosmopolitan. external to it: in the context of the surreptitiously, Art is specially able to convey the intimate relation between the material and work itself – this life’s strange capac the conceptual that this requires, invoking the contingency of home by positionto be both at home in the world and ing us at the nexus of the real and the imaginary, while using the sensory force external to it: of object, image, and spaces to engage memory, desire, and cognition. (8)

Collectively the artists’ work in Liminal in its various forms, speaks to a freedom that is a result of this transitional moment in the quest to define ongoing changes Collectively the artists’ work in Limin in the evolution of contemporary art and the work in Collectively the artists’ work in ”challenges that arises fromsenseIs an acute WhatCollectively do we make ofartists’ this it culture. These are creative environments in its various forms, speaks to in its various forms, speaks to sense ofdistance “otherness” and difference sort of we experience as bi that ultimately direct viewers that is result of this transition that is anew atowards result of(and this transitiot order to find ways of speaking distance from within between) spaces of contemplation allowing us the quest to ongoing indo the quest toofdefine define ongoing aspects of both humanity and cultur What we make thisand sense of n own in sense of interiority the Ben to face, question and experience the in the evolution of contempora in the evolution of contempora representation, even when those me appears to be an aitsort of distance weexperience experience as b challenges that arises culture. from an These acute sense are creative env culture.

These are creative env ings appear elusive and fleeting. distance from within (and between) of “otherness” and difference in orderdirect to that ultimately viewers that ultimately direct viewers own sense of interiority and the wortt find new ways of speaking to aspects of spaces of spaces of contemplation contemplation allow around ourselves?

For Prous), itallow app both humanity and cultural representation, to face, question and experienc to face, question and experien be an experience even when those meanings appear elusive challenges that arises challenges that arises from from an an and fleeting. of “otherness” and difference of “otherness” and difference ii 74

find find new new ways ways of of speaking speaking to to aa

aspects of b aspec

art obal

eously I with oalam , and ome liar and ately tions cal gnition, In iaraand his ions opus nition, amin na so histo ing the opus life as min him, by o to eng great the city ife as dy be him, great city d be

nal nn Liminal teaLiminal a a freedom infreedom both a nal moment moment onal to ) one’s changes changes ral Is it njamin), not ary art ary and eanbotharta and vironments vironments ) one’s towards towards rld wing us wing pearsus to ce the nce the n acute acute sense sense in order in order to to aspects aspects of of

both humanity cts of both humanity

Notes Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 1994.

Bourriaud, “Altermodern Manifesto”, 2009, online at www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/ manifesto.shtm. hooks, bell. “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness,” in S. Harding (Ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies.

New York: Routledge, 2004.

Meskimmon, Marsha. Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Richter, Gerhard. Text, Writings, Interview and Letters 1961–2009. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009.

Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: Liminal Period,” in The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

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“ We, the masters, are not home.�: Between Provenance and Endings, Liminality Ricky Varghese

Where do I come from? Where am I going? Who am I in the world? Who am I to the world? These are perhaps some of the questions that most immediately preoccupy one’s critical and psychical acumen, that most intimately—an intimacy both simultaneously familiar and profoundly feared—deal with questions of identity, identification, and recognition, that of both the self and the other. In a particularly arresting passage from his essay on Marcel Proust’s magnum opus In Search of Lost Time, Walter Benjamin describes Proust’s own technique, so to speak, when it came to understanding the very experience of the latter’s own life as neurotically, obsessively recorded by him, surreptitiously, in the context of the great work itself—this life’s strange capacity to be both at home in the world and be external to it: Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection. He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for.

This is what ages us—this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us, but we, the masters, were not home. (48)

What do we make of this sense of not being at home with ourselves in the world?

Is it a sort of distance we experience as both a distance from within (and between) one’s own sense of interiority and the world around ourselves? For Proust (via Benjamin), it appears to be an experience of being marked by the absence of enough 77

time—“none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for”—for him, it is not so much spatial, a distance as I have referred to it, but temporal, a relationship, rather, to the time of our respective lives. However, the “unhomeliness” described in the above passage insists on the spatial nature of how we experience life as well: in the absence of enough time to live out our lives more fully, more truly—more, more, more, the obstinate “more” of modernity, the recalcitrant “more” of capitalist alienation, that binds us to stubborn fantasies of progress—we find that, we, the masters of our own lives, are not at home within it.

In 1919, nearly a decade proceeding when Benjamin would write his essay on Proust, Sigmund Freud would have already architected a blueprint of sorts to describe this experience of “unhomeliness” through his theorizing of the concept of the uncanny. Accordingly for Freud, the uncanny—unheimlich in German, translated quite literally to mean “unhomely”—was ‘that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar’ (124). This draws our attention, returns it in a manner of speaking, to the aforementioned intimacy that both ignites a feeling of simultaneous familiarity, of desire, of a craving, and, as well, a feeling of fear, of incommensurable distance, perhaps even of horror and of terror. There is something to be learned from this liminal space.

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Perhaps, this could be the very defining feature of “liminality” itself. Straying now from its anthropological roots in the study of religious experience, perhaps, it might be worthwhile to think of this liminal space as the very threshold of the experience of being wherein we seek to ask how both our interiority and exteriority relate to one another; how the self and the other (both within and without) might meet, like lovers who are strangers as well to one another, while holding one another at bay, at a distance, because being too close would mean pushing that very threshold of the experience of being to its limit, its possible breaking point, while being too far away from one another feels like the experience of a kind of irrecuperable, ungrievable loss.

I want to know where I come from, but am I prepared for the complexity of the answer, a historiographical answer, to that query? I want to know where I am going—in the world and toward the time of the future—but the uncertainty of that “where” is simultaneously jarring and exhilarating. I want to know who I am in the world, but what if the answer is painfully unbearable to me? I want to know who I am to the world, to those around me in this world, but what if the answer is stamped by the blemish, the not-so-easyto-ignore mark or stigmata, of my rejection from the world, how would I contend with the seemingly immense weight of such an eviction? The liminal space, the space that contains the threshold of the experience of being and being together while being apart, both holds me in close proximity

to this pleasurable knowing, knowing the answers to the questions that haunt me most immediately, that keep me awake at night, while also protects me, shields me, from the pain of this self-knowledge. This liminality announces, to me, to my self, my arrival at the very borderlands of knowing itself; finding myself having arrived in a space of, at once, both sharing with and within the world and being separate from it. Referring to such spacing of and within existence as a sort of shared-separation, a decision between us, art historian and critic John Paul Ricco remarks: Separation is the spacing of existence, and is, by definition, never solitary but always shared. It is what affirms that for anything to exist, there must be more than one thing, each one separated from each other one, together partaking in the spacing between that is opened up by separation. Existence, therefore, is relational and shared, and hence is always to be understood as coexistence.

Not the coming together of solitary and autonomous beings, but existence as sharing or partaking in separation as the there is of existence—the spacing (there) of being (is) together. If separation is the spacing of existence, and if existence is always relational and shared, then sharing in separation is the praxis of coexistence—of being-together. (1)

Sharing in the ambivalence of this shared-separation, as possibly signified by the liminal space that holds my self from the other and holds my self from myself, that other within my self, while also holding us together in this instance that is our separation, appears to be the very decision of living, the very decision that makes the matter of life, the matter that forms life itself, its very existence. We, the 79

masters of and to our lives, were not home, but perhaps, we may find such a home in the space and spacing provided for by the decision that springs forth from within that very space. The search for that space—the liminal space in which we seek the answers to those most intimate of all questions about the threshold of the experience of being—comes to us in the decision we might make to stay within that space, to tolerate its liminal ambivalence. In his stunning short story, The End of the World, wherein a child, an orphan, runs in search of this very precise thing, the very end of the world, Robert Walser describes such an ambivalence in evocative detail: A child who had neither father and mother nor brother and sister, was a member of no family and utterly homeless, hit on the idea of running off, all the way to the end of the world. It didn’t need to take much with it or do much packing, for it had only the clothes on its back. Just like that it set off, the sun shone, but the poor child took no notice of the sunshine. On and on it ran, past many sights, but took no notice of the sights it passed. On and on it ran, past many people, but took no notice of anyone. On and on it ran, until nightfall, but the child took no notice of the night. It gave heed neither to day nor night, neither to objects nor people, gave, no heed to the sun and none to the moon and every bit as little to the stars. Further and further it ran, neither frightened nor hungry, always with the one thought in mind, the one notion—the notion, that is, of looking for the end of the world and running till it got there. Surely in the end it would find it, the child thought. “It’s after everything, at the very back,” it thought. “It’s all the way at the end,” it thought. Was the child right in this belief? Just wait a little. Had the child lost its wits? Would you just wait a little?

We’ll see soon enough. On and on the child ran, imagining the end of the world first as a high wall, then as a deep abyss, then as a beautiful green meadow, then as a lake, then as a polka-dotted cloth, then as a thick wide paste, then simply as pure air, then as a clean white plain, then as a brownish path, then as nothing at all, or as something the child itself alas, couldn’t quite identify. (100)

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Notes

It is this homelessness, this familiar and yet feared unhomeliness, this orphan child’s search for the end of the world that governs every decision we make in search of, in pursuit of, that very end, the end of knowing itself. The decision to stay within this space of a liminal ambivalence regarding who we are as both subjects and objects is also a decision to move within the realm of that ambivalence.

It is a decision that knows neither an objective provenance nor a perceivable end (except, perhaps, the ultimate sense of an end, death; even then, memory keeps life “living,” insists on keeping the dead alive). It is a decision that we share in our shared-separation from one another, but also share in the gesture of being-together and at home within the shape and form of that homelessness at the threshold of being, the liminal uncertainty, that shapes our experience of that being. In the end, at the risk of sounding aphoristic, perhaps all decisions, made in this space of subjective yet shared liminality, are also consequences tirelessly in search of a home, a home that much like the child we cannot quite and easily discern, but still one that preoccupies our most intimate fantasies regarding what it is to be a being, actualized, that knows and precisely feels ambivalent about and within that space of such knowing.

Benjamin, Walter, “On the Image of Proust,” in id., Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock et al., 4 vols., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996-2003.

Freud,Sigmund, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans.

David McLintock, London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Ricco, John Paul, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes,(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Walser, Robert, “The End of the World,” in Robert Walser Masquerade and Other Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1990.

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Exhibition Works List Lucie Chan

Jérôme Havre

LoFoSto (Longing For Stories) 2009 Digital print and watercolour on paper, animated video projections Installation dimensions variable pp. 4–5, 10–21, 64

Nécessité et Accident 2016 Mixed media installation Installation dimensions variable pp. 6, 8, 40–61, 68, 70, 74

Take Me Back (Onde Eu Pertn o) 2015 Installation: digital prints, watercolour and ink on paper 6’8” x 4’3” each panel pp. 2–3, 22–27, 86-87 Poem For Taxi Drivers 2013 Gel pens, watercolour, ink, pencil crayon on paper Installation dimensions variable pp. 28–39

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Artists’ Biographies Lucie Chan holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design with a specialization in drawing. She has shown nationally and internationally in various group and solo exhibitions including at Museum London in London, Ontario; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax and the Richmond Art Gallery in Richmond, British Columbia. She has also participated as an artist in residence in venues including ARTerra in Lobão da Beira, Portugal; the Ross Creek Center for the Arts in Canning, Nova Scotia and Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff, Alberta. She has been the recipient of numerous provincial and national grants including being long-listed twice for the Sobey Art Award (2005, 2010). Chan currently lives and works in Vancouver where she teaches at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Jérôme Havre completed his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was awarded three scholarships that enabled him to pursue different art practices: silk printing techniques in New York (Cooper Union), printing techniques in Barcelona (Bellas Artes) and painting and video in Berlin (Universität der Künste Berlin—HDK).

He has exhibited his works in Europe, Africa and North America, including at the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Havre has been awarded several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Quebec Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and in 2011 was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. He recently completed an Artist in Residence Program at the Art Gallery of Ontario and currently resides in Toronto.

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Curator’s and Guest Writer’s Biographies Pamela Edmonds is an independent curator currently based in Toronto. Her primary focus has been on contemporary art that explores the politics of representation particularly as they relate to issues of race, gender and cultural identity. Recent curatorial projects include Between Spheres, Daniels Spectrum Artscape, Toronto, 2015; Skin Deep: Reimaging the Portrait, Project Gallery/ Nia Centre, Toronto, 2015; Confluence: Shifting Perspectives of the Caribbean, Art in Transit, 2014; Tracings: Recent Work by the W5Art Collective at the Women’s Arts Resource Centre Gallery, Toronto, 2014; Bounty: Chikonzero Chazunguza, Gallery 101, Ottawa, 2013. She is a founding member of Third Space Art Projects, a curatorial collective co-founded in 2009 with Sally Frater. TSAP is a forum for the promotion and presentation of multidisciplinary art projects that explore transculturalism, with a particular focus on visual cultures of the Black Atlantic. Her curatorial work can be viewed at www.pe-curates.space.

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Ricky Varghese received his PhD in Sociology of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto in 2014. He serves presently as an advisory editor for Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture and has been the lead editor for a special issue of the journal on the theme of the “Ruin” which came out in October 2014.

He is presently acting as lead editor for a special issue of the same journal on the theme of “AIDS and Memory,” which is slated to be released in the later part of summer 2016. Trained as a social worker, with both his BSW and MSW, he currently has a private practice as a therapist in downtown Toronto.

artists’ and Curator’s Acknowledgements Lucie Chan I’d like to acknowledge and express my immense gratitude towards several individuals who made the works in Liminal possible. To Angelica LeMinh, Jihee Min, and Mary Wong for the time they spent with me to explain their ideas around defining Asian culture: without your stories, LoFoSto would not exist. To Micaela Ferreira, João Rebelo, Noe Kidder, Vera Silva and all the local school kids who literally saved my live at ARTterra Residency during my first trip to Portugal, with your trust in me to draw all over their drawings. Outside of art-making, you planted some special memories into my mind which allowed Take Me Back to eventually emerge. To the seven taxi drivers who drove me to and from the airport and were open to sharing your life lessons with me. I wish there were some way I could find you all again hear how you would respond to Poem For Taxi Drivers.

To Pamela Edmonds, for your always incredible and influential curatorial vision that upheld my work in several venues across Canada over the last 17 years, and of course, for your soulsister friendship over a long stretch of time.

Pamela Edmonds Many thanks to Curator Linda Jansma for providing me with the opportunity to present Liminal and to realize this exhibition catalogue. I would like to thank the team at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery; including Sonya Jones, Sam Mogelonsky and Jason Dankel, for all their help in bringing this exhibition to fruition, as well as the incredible volunteers and support staff. I also would like to extend my gratitude to Ricky Varghese for his deeply insightful essay, an enriching addition to this publication.

I am blessed and humbled to work with such incredibly generous and impactful artists and thank both Lucie and Jérôme for your commitment to this project from its inception. Thank you Atanas Bozdarov for bringing together the design of the publication and Toni Hafkenscheid for your thoughtful documentation.

Jérôme Havre Jérôme Havre would like to acknowledge the support of the following: Luciana Pierre, Urs Dierker, Michael Prokopow, Blaine Evan, Kiki, Brendan Coughlin and Erin Stump.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Liminal: Lucie Chan Jérôme Havre Curated by Pamela Edmonds Catalogue of an exhibition held at the The Robert McLaughlin Gallery from May 21, 2016 to September 11, 2016 ISBN 978-1-926589-90-9 (paperback)

1. Chan, Lucie, 1975—Exhibitions.

2. Havre, Jérôme—Exhibitions.

3. Multimedia (Art)—21st century—Exhibitions.

4. Installations (Art)—21st century—Exhibitions.

5. Art, Canadian—21st century—Exhibitions.

I. Edmonds, Pamela, writer of added commentary, organizer II. Chan, Lucie, 1975– . Works. Selections.

III. Havre, Jérôme. Works.

IV. Robert McLaughlin Gallery, issuing body, host institution.

V. Title: Liminal.

N6545.6.L82 2016 709.71074’71356 C2016-901647-1 Cover image: Jérôme Havre Photo credit: Toni Hafkenscheid

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

Liminal: Lucie Chan and Jérôme Havre © 2016 The Robert McLaughlin Gallery 72 Queen Street., Civic Centre Oshawa, ON L1H 3Z3 www.rmg.on.ca Design: Atanas Design Editing: Linda Jansma, Sonya Jones Printing: Sonic Print.ca Photo Credits: Toni Hafkenscheid (except pp. 6, 36–37, 52–53, 74) Jérôme Havre pp. 6, 52–53, 74 Lucie Chan pp. 36–37 Curator: Pamela Edmonds Distributed by: ABC: Art Books Canada 327 Ste. Catherine W., Suite 229 Montréal, Québec H3B 1A2 www.abcartbookscanada.com