Free
Foundation
Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE
July 6 → January 15, 2023
In celebration of its 15th anniversary, the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present an exhibition by Yayoi Kusama
PHI Foundation
465 Saint-Jean Street
Education Room (SS01)
July 6, 2022—January 15, 2023
Wednesday to Friday: 12 PM—7 PM
Saturday and Sunday: 11 AM—6 PM
Free admission
Reservations required
Access to the installation is included in the ticket for Yayoi Kusama.
To visit doux soft club’s installation only, you can book a visit between Wednesday and Sunday with Daniel Fiset: [email protected]. Please reserve at least 48 hours before the date of your visit.
Before visiting, please review all essential information about the visit, including details on accessibility at the Foundation.
Public Engagement Project
bleu de lieu is a public engagement project conceived by doux soft club in conjunction with the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE.
bleu de lieu is a participatory installation that invites the public to stay, to rest, to meditate and to interact with the different elements found in our Education Room. For the occasion, the room has been dipped in the characteristic hue of doux soft club’s works. Oscillating between abstract sculptures and furniture elements, the installation’s welcoming shapes are meant to be used and moved around, and are thus constantly reshaped by our visitors’ presence.
This evolutive artwork will be the host of a series of performative gestures carried out by doux soft club during the exhibition. Video traces of these performances will be progressively inserted into the installation, revealing the sculptural objects’ potential for activation. Accompanied by different sound textures, these videos will explore the sensorial and material aspects of the space. bleu de lieu will also be activated by collaborators who will be invited to respond to the work punctually during events, as well as during creative activities offered by our education department.
doux soft club and the PHI Foundation would like to thank Marc Dumaine and Atelier Clark. The creation of this work was made possible by the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Curator: Daniel Fiset
bleu de lieu’s creative activity asks participants to undertake a series of individual and collective movement exercises, tied to a performance score imagined by doux soft club. This playful collaborative score invites groups to activate the installation’s shapes in different ways, discovering new poetic uses for them. During the activity, participants will discover various ways of engaging with sensoriality: through tactility, textures, colours, sounds, noises, and their effects on our bodies and environments.
In addition to being offered to groups booking a guided visit to the Foundation, the public will be able to experience the activity during our Open House events.
doux soft club
doux soft club is an artistic and curatorial collective reuniting the practices of duo Pénélope et Chloë, Mariane Stratis, and Marion Paquette. The four artists met while completing their B.A.s in visual and media arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (2012). It is through numerous exchanges and a mutual desire to see their practices evolve together that doux soft club was founded in 2017. Moved by cohesion, they see the regrouping of their plural visions as an essential part of their process. The club is an adaptable structure that invites all members to collaborate in the sharing, exchange and interinfluence of ideas. doux soft club’s work has been seen in Canada in the context of solo exhibitions at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art (Montreal, 2022), the Darling Foundry (Montréal, 2023), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, 2019), Verticale (Laval, 2021 and 2019), GHAM & DAFE (Montréal, 2018) and in group exhibitions at the Campus de la Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (2021), Musée Ambulant (Québec, 2021), Arprim (Montréal, 2020) and Puce N.5 (Saint-Armand, 2019). The collective was nominated for the Plein Sud Award (Longueuil, 2020) and has received a research, creation and exploration grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2020).
The collective is interested in an aesthetics of softness, which brings forward a rehabilitation of the senses through notions of care, empathy, and resilience. Doux-soft is understood by the artists as the capacity to be amazed by the banal. This capacity is closely tied to the contexts through which the works appear, and allow for a poetics of the everyday to emerge in their works. Their projects investigate, dialogue with, and take on a multiplicity of forms: exterior interventions, websites, artist books, exhibitions, and performances. In this way, their performative work allows them to animate the sculptural objects they create, revealing their sensorial and sensuous characters. These manipulations, documentations and exhibitions seek to transform the viewer’s experience through a series of slippages. By constantly revisiting each project’s potential, the club reflects on the polymorphic, lively and permutable aspects of their production. Through their process, a collective intelligence emerges, feeding their research and production: inter-influence, determine how something is influenced, copy and paste, throw a ball around, catch it, and throw it back.
Pénélope et Chloë are a duo of women artists based in Montréal, working together since 2014. They each obtained a B.A. in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2015. Their practice is developed through knowing collaborations, engaging with public spaces through the use of various games and textile installations. The duo's mission is to reuse their works in a colourful cycle in order to make them grow and see them transform. Leaving space for experimentation and spontaneous encounters and actions, they pay particular attention to the environmental impact of their work. They co-founded Récré, a zero-waste play laboratory for children and adults. They believe that two heads are better than one to survive the somewhat hostile terrain of the creative world.
Their work has been seen in collective exhibitions across Canada, including at Diagonale (Montréal, 2021), Centre d’exposition Lethbridge (Montréal, 2020), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2018), and internationally in Argentina (La Ira Del Dios and ArteBA Fair, Buenos Aires, 2018), France (Paris, 2015) and Switzerland (Renens, 2015). Pénélope and Chloë are also tied to dance. They worked on the set design of many projects, including 1, 2 maybe 3 by Jean & Syd (Centaur Theatre, 2022), More-than-things by Emilie Pinault (La Chapelle, 2020), Le Fil des jours (2021) and Danses à venir (2022) in collaboration with researcher and choreographer Catherine Lavoie-Marcus.
Mariane Stratis (Québec, 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Rivière-du-Loup. Her work focuses on how societies manage, process and adapt to the loss of human life. In her practice, she questions the various cults related to death as an event by raising questions about the future of the body and its fragility. She produces installations that include sculpture, photography, archives, textiles and performance. She is currently a M.F.A candidate in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University (2019-2023) and holds a B.A. in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2016).
She has recently taken part in residencies in France (Ateliers Millesfeuilles, Nantes, 2016) and Canada (EST-NORD-EST, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, 2021; Sagamie, Alma, 2021). Her work was presented in the solo exhibition Histoire d’archives molles at the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent (Rivière-du-Loup, 2021) and in group shows, including: Géographies tactiles (Montréal, 2022), De l’esprit des lieux (Québec, 2021), Pictura: pleins feux sur la peinture (Montréal, 2020), IGNITION 16 (Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montréal, 2020) and exhibitions at Artch (Montréal, 2019) and Art Mûr (Montréal, 2015).
Marion Paquette (Montréal, 1992) lives in Montréal and holds a B.A. in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2015). Paquette’s practice stems from the creation of interfaces and situations that investigate sensitive relationships between body, space and object. Experiences of discomfort, fragility and ambiguity instigate the artist’s research on the taming of the social, natural, and built environment. This approach, intimately linked to the contexts in which Paquette’s interventions take place, generates performative activations and installations that combine textiles, objects, photography, and video. The artist also takes part in the collaborative duo demi-mesure (2020) alongside Clara Cousineau. This collaboration explores the potential of the "in-between condition," oscillating between opposition and complementarity.
Since 2016, Paquette has taken part in multiple residencies in Canada, France and Japan. The artist’s work has been presented in the context of group exhibitions in France at the Fol Film Festival (Paris, 2021) and at Ateliers Millesfeuilles (Nantes, 2016); in Japan, at Studio Kura (Itoshima, 2018) and in Canada, notably at Dazibao (Montréal 2022), Espace sensible (Montréal, 2022), OFFTA (Montréal, 2021), Galerie Castiglione (Montréal, 2020), Espace Transmission (Montréal, 2020), Galerie Atelier B (Montréal, 2020), Artch (Montréal, 2019) and GHAM & DAFE (Montréal, 2018).
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