CATHERINE BOLDUC * ARTIST STATEMENT *
In the practice of my art (installation, sculpture, video and drawing), I am interested in the way the human psyche perceives and constructs reality by feeding it with its own desires, by transgressing it with its fabrication of fantasy and fiction. The core of my work rests on subjective experiences dealing with personal memories in which fabulation and idealization produce a mental transfiguration of reality or conversely revisited desire is subjected to the ordeal of reality, illusion faces disillusion and deception head-on. My work is an invitation to experience phantasmagorical objects and spaces alluding to, for instance, an ideal fantasized life, exotic quests, utopian dreams of love, oneiric wanderings, but where magic also reveals its dark side. My aesthetic intention is to evoke human vulnerability when facing the discrepancy between desires and reality.In my sculpture and video installations, deliberately enticing effects made of smoke, sounds, mirrors, coloured lights, strobes and other delights for the eye magnify various junk and everyday materials. However the precariousness of the assemblage or also the threatening even unbearable sound or lightening, risk reducing the wonders to nothingness, like a house of cards on the verge of collapse. In my installations, I try to challenge the viewer’s imagination towards the other side of a closed or slightly closed door, to go behind an impassable wall, or a hole riddled one, to peek in a showcase, or in improbable portholes, a door’s peephole or inside a mysterious wardrobe for instance, to make a breach in reality thus opening up to a fantastic realm.
While pursuing my installation research, I maintain a sustained drawing practice, which is becoming more and more predominant in my artistic process. Drawing allows me to create spaces in which gravity has no hold, where the eye is able to be dazed without physical restraint in an overload of labyrinthine lines. My drawings are composed of motifs amalgamating one over the other thus creating artificial landscapes in which volcanoes, hairy mountains, mazes, flying carpets, starry skies, merry-go-rounds, spiral staircases and castles become recurrent figures. Most of these landscapes refer to places where I have travelled (Egypt, Turkey, Japan) but my drawings turn them into fantasized versions of their actual scenery. These real places having become unreal spaces become besotted with an idealized vision of the world where desire and fabulation overcome reality and plausibility. But, simultaneously these entanglements of black hair and erupting volcanoes also flirt with disaster and the dark side of the psyche.
Catherine Bolduc