Shared spaces – a window onto Manon Labrecque’s studio

Manon Labrecque began to explore the video medium as part of her visual arts studies in the early 1990s. Having previously obtained a Bachelor’s degree in dance, she had become interested in experimental movement during her training and as a performer of pieces choreographed by the likes of Jean-Pierre Perreault and Tassy Teekman. In the period that followed, she made short videos in which she explored the technical and formal possibilities of this accessible medium. Parc d’amusement (1992), Rien que la vérité, toute la vérité and Vice, vertu et vice versa (1993) were produced during this period. In these works, Labrecque experimented with closed-circuit and live filming, and with speed of both image and sound. She discovered different types of space, and very soon began to play with the mise en abyme. These processes proved to be highly beneficial to this young artist, who was interested in space and the body, and who strove to capture and transmit the body’s presence, energy, and strength, indeed its very essence.  

Labrecque was an uncompromising and prolific artist, who threw herself wholeheartedly into the creative process. Between 1992-95 she made nine videos and had already established and refined a signature style. The lightweight camera (Hi8 video) became an extension of her gaze and body, an ally and an accomplice that allowed her to infiltrate reality. In a way, she was able to move through the public space incognito and, importantly, videotape everything from a close range. RGB, Un pouce 3/8, L’idée fixe, ou, Tu peux toujours pleurer Lolita, and La petite vision¹ (1994) seem to have been created in this spirit. She cast her eye with curiosity, amazement, and affection.

Manon Labrecque approached the creative process with rigour and her actions oscillated between exercises, challenges, rituals, exorcisms and acts of play – each a different way of learning. For each one, she sketched out a process and scrupulously adhered to it, determining a precise frame – conceptual, symbolic and psychological – and creating an invisible pact between the artist, the camera, and the audience. Certain performance-actions were treated with depth and gravity, even anxiety; others were treated more casually, or even with skepticism. For Labrecque was curious about the influence of reality in existence: ‘Is there a reality, beyond what we see, that uses the useless?’ ²

All presence – human, animal, vegetal – is essential to each video. Labrecque drew on real things, which she energetically scrutinized, transformed, and dissected. She found inspiration this way. Slowing down or suspending an action, accelerating it so it becomes blurred and the words dissolve, dismantling shapes and colors until they disappear, sometimes until the video signal is gone – these are just some of the strategies she employed. The body’s expressions and postures were a rich and abundant source of material to this keen observer of the human condition. Consider the almost clownlike presence of the female character in Rien que la vérité, toute la vérité or in Vice, vertu et vice versa,³ whose gestures, tics and imitations were sometimes mocking, often exaggerated, and at points verged on hysterical. The laughter, the crazy laughter and accelerated speech; exaggeration was used like filters for the expression of the self, of a fragile and vulnerable state that only seeks to be revealed. Could this have been a way for the artist to bring us into her work?

a presence

Throughout her thirty years of practice, Labrecque regularly appeared in her videos. She literally inhabited them. In all of the early works, her presence could be interpreted as a very personal way of approaching, of mastering, this fascinating device for capturing image, movement and sound. It enabled her to explore the potential of the proximity and intimacy that the camera affords. While this relationship developed during the shoot, through extreme close-ups or unusual perspectives on the body or face, it continued in the editing process when Labrecque decided to manipulate the video signal, to stretch this material and ‘spin’ the images.⁴ 

Face, model, performer, ghost or reference point, the artist’s body set the scale of the vision to be shared. ‘A vertical, a diagonal, a horizontal in the image’.⁵ Consider Hara Kiri (exercices) (1998) or Silences nomades (2002). There is a body, often dressed in a red raincoat, signifying vitality: a vehicle for movement, an anchor, a site of energy in the performance. There is the face whose eyes are fixed upon us, expectant of our gaze. Her mouth sketches a smile, or a pout; at certain immodest moments, it invites us to dive into the throat, to cry out, or to succumb to the irresistible urge to yawn. An organic, expressive presence, at times expressionist, at other times visceral. Through image and sound, the artist communicates physical phenomena (weightlessness, spinning, falling), sensation (disorientation, vertigo, levitation), emotion (joy, sadness) or a process (abandonment, forgetting, grief). The memories and experiences attached are toned down, kept at a distance, protected: Labrecque kept her personal life to herself.

In searching for a real image – an image of the self – the artist showed her desire to forge an identity through a register of expressions and emotions – a perpetual metamorphosis that sometimes led to the disintegration of the image. In En deçà du réel (1997) we find this type of presence, which first dematerializes before our eyes in the performer’s frantic race around her studio, and then disappears through electronic manipulations. On an existential level, this endangering of the image is at times intolerable, so heightened is its expressionist quality. Labrecque attacks her own face, mercilessly stretching it until it is monstruous. Violently assaulted, in this instance the image is certainly stronger than words. The artist follows this approach involving metamorphosis or disfigurement with Contagion (2008), in which she films herself slowly yawning, triggering a mimetic response in the viewer through pure empathy.

movement

Very early on in her practice, the artist realized that the camera could and should move. To this end, she conceived a range of mechanical supports, enabling her to delve deeper into other emotions, other perspectives on the spaces filmed and, therefore, other sensorial experiences. Silences nomades is a great example. The intimacy captured in familiar places, such as the studio, opens up to a vastness: a desert horizon, stretching as far as the eye can see. For this work, Labrecque chose the Gobi Desert in Mongolia to shoot a series of performances with an extremely mobile camera. Placed upon her chest, the camera recorded the landscape to the rhythm of her breathing. While attached to a long rod, it provoked feelings of disorientation and vertigo, and the strong sensation that the ground was giving way before our eyes (or under our feet!). Despite the vastness of this landscape, an unsettling intimacy and an existential force emerges in Silences nomades, as if Labrecque felt at home there. Regarding the nomads she encountered during this expedition, whose impact on subsequent works she did not anticipate, the artist wrote: ‘With the nomads [everything is] magnificent. They are the present moment, the silence… being and doing = simplicity’.⁶

Silences nomades was conceived in solitude, and this was further accentuated by the move to an unknown land with a language, culture and music that Labrecque discovered little by little. The desert proved to be a powerful laboratory for experimentation and introspection, as the artist encountered basic elements such as water, wind, light, heat, earth, the horizon, and silence. She would experiment masterfully with the self and its doubles, and this would feed her subsequent work and the creation of drawings, and kinetic and sound installations. The exploration of unpredictable and uncontrollable movements, and of moments of accepted vulnerability, surprises and disturbs. Connecting body and mind was a desire, an objective, and an obsession that haunted Labrecque through the works she conceived, created and exhibited.

silence

The artist knows that the body, through its presence, movements, and hesitations, communicates more clearly and directly than speech. With rare exceptions, very few words are exchanged in her videos. Voices are sometimes scrambled and often accelerated to the point of incomprehension, as in Rien que la vérité, toute la vérité or Vice, vertu et vice versa.Manon Labrecque also interfered with the spoken element by leaving a sentence suspended and unfinished, as in Hara Kiri (exercices), for example, or by repeating a fragment of text ad nauseam, as in C’t’aujourd’hui qu’ (1999). With humour, irony, and a disarming lucidity, Labrecque highlighted the limitations of speech as a method of communication, as the absurdity that surfaces from the repetition of certain sentences brushes against the specter of solitude and madness, with words that go nowhere. In fact, she had a particular fondness for the passage from a physical to a psychological state, from the tangible to the emotive, from the prosaic to the emotional. Such oscillations are discernible in the ensemble of her works. Consider the alternation between (sometimes hyper) motion and stillness. Between silence, or mutism, and frenetic speaking. Between weightlessness, floating and suspension, and falling, gravity, and anchoring.  

Labrecque marked our imagination and the history of video, media arts, and the visual arts through her video-performances and her spontaneous, unique, touching and absurd actions, her insightful and powerful rituals. She proved that it was possible to reinvent and revisit the vocabulary of video that was established and developed at the beginning of the 1960s. A multidisciplinary artist, she also conceived surprising live performances, and created magnificent installations integrating drawing, photography, video and kinetic mechanisms refined to transmit movement to the images and sounds that lived within her – this movement that was so dear to her and that she shared with us in infinite ways. Labrecque taught us how to see and touch from a distance: hands reaching out, eyes closed, to preserve the integrity of the birth of an emotion or perhaps to offer herself a little more time to recall a memory. Throughout her work in the studio, she explored unusual physical and psychological states. Manon Labrecque delved deeply into memories beyond her own story. Through these works and her presence, she forged connections with all of us – connections to emotional spaces that remain with us today and that we can revisit to rediscover ‘the space that unites and separates us’.⁷ 

Nicole Gingras.

NOTES
1. These four videos were made as part of the event La 3e fenêtre in 1994, a production by Vidéographe, Montréal; curator: Luc Bourdon.
2. This line was spoken by the artist in En deçà du réel (1997).
3. There are two performers in this video: Sophie Desjardins and Manon Labrecque.
4. This illustrative term was used several times by the artist when discussing her work.
5. Extract from ‘A-Z’, Manon Labrecque – Corps en chute, Montréal, Éditions Nicole Gingras, 2002, p. 78.
6. Manon Labrecque, 6 November 1999; extract from a correspondence between the artist and Nicole Gingras.
7. This phrase was taken from the video Silences nomades (2002) and would be the subject of a drawing reproduced in Manon Labrecque – des [ré] animations, Laval, Maison des arts de Laval, 2022.