Colonial Elegance; Carl Bouchard and Martin Dufrasne

Friday, October 30, 2009 to Friday, December 4, 2009

For more than ten years, Québec multidisciplinary artists Carl Bouchard and Martin Dufrasne have been investigating the tensions that lie within twisted behavioural structures and perverse relational dynamics. Colonial Elegance is a new corpus of artwork composed of photographs and installations. The archetypal figure of the pioneer and his clearing of rough and uncultivated land are used to approach the topics of exploitation, domination and submission; at the same time literally speaking of management of territory through the metaphor of control and the constraint of individuals. In Colonial Elegance Bouchard and Dufrasne frustrate our desire to distinguish clearly, to establish quickly and to slice definitively between good and evil, tenderness and aggressivity, theatricality and performance.