michelle lacombe

 

 

 

I currently work with the body in a practice that is located somewhere between the concerns of performance and the visual arts. Rooted in action and radical feminist critique, my practice amounts to an “undisciplined” research encompassing a variety of performative forms such as body art, performance, drawing, installation, video, and fibres. These intersect to generate overlapping disciplines that explore issues such as desire, illness, loss and landscape (or line).

Concretely, I use simple and familiar gestures to evoke emotional states that communicate, mark and map the body in a relational or historical context. Specifically, I am interested in the embodiment of representations of bodies which include the female figure, bodies of land and textual bodies. With the use of actions, I stimulate corporeal states of being and markings that exist as (performances of) these representations. Meaning is achieved when these actions, states and traces accumulate, transform or dislocate familiar materials at sites of communication: the mouth, the hands, the skin, the breath, the surface (or body substitute). Purposefully minimalist, the work is precise and unravels into a complex conceptual proposal, existing in a sober space where theory collides with experience.

 

Bio:

Michelle Lacombe (Montreal, QC) has developed a unique body-based practice since her graduation from Concordia University in 2006. Focusing on a visual language where bodily gesture and mark marking are entwined and confused, Lacombe creates short works that are both confrontational and tragic. Her work has been show in Canada, the USA and Germany in the context of performance events, exhibitions and colloquiums.

Her practice as an artist is paralleled by a strong commitment to artist-run culture and alternative methods of artistic dissemination. She has worked at a number of Montreal galleries including articule, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse and VIVA ! Art Action.