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INSTALLATION

Bleu de lieu bg
Photo: doux soft club

doux soft club: bleu de lieu

  • Event
  • Free
  • Contemporary Art
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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.

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

Creative Activity

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.

Biographies

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.

douxsoftclub.com
@douxsoftclub

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