Dualité / Dualité

An exhibition curated by Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley)

November 4, 2015 – January 23, 2016

Opening: Wednesday, November 4, 2015, from 6 PM to 8 PM

(preceded by a guided visit with the artists at 5:30 PM)

 

Dualité / Dualité (2015) is a series of new collage-based works by Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley), produced as the result of a 2014 research residency at Artexte. These works form a new mise-en-scène for the investigation of Françoise Sullivan’s choreography Dualité. First performed with Jeanne Renaud in 1948 and re-performed many times since, notably at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 1988, Dualité is an intimate portrait of two natures intertwined in one being. Unfolding in a series of parallel gestures for two dancers, the action ofDualité is expressed in a space activated between them. Dualité / Dualité revisits multiple performances of the original choreography to understand how movements are translated over time and how ephemeral events are experienced and re-interpreted through documentation. The resulting images forge new links between these performances, highlighting the formal and psychological implications of the mirroring and layering, doubling and repetition found within the original performances and the artists’ re-interpretation.

Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley) is a conceptual collaborative art practice based in Montreal. Working together under the name “Leisure” since 2004, Carruthers and Wesley engage with socio-historical narratives through conceptual research, conversation, intervention, published texts and exhibition making. Leisure has produced exhibitions and special projects in collaboration with venues in Canada and abroad, and participated in residencies in Banff, Dawson City, Haliburton and Vienna. Their current research on gesture and spatial narrative include Dualité / Dualité (2015) and Conversations With Magic Stones forthcoming in 2016 at EFA, New York.