Fondation

As part of the public engagement project I WILL NEVER FINISH REMOVING ALL THESE FACES. (GUIDED REFLECTION), Nadège Grebmeier Forget will present a performance, titled REFRACTIONS, HOW TO ELEVEN.

The performance will be presented within the installation conceived by the artist. Traces generated by the performance will be visible to the public during the last two days of the project’s presentation.

I WILL NEVER FINISH REMOVING ALL THESE FACES. (GUIDED REFLECTION) is a public engagement project conceived by Nadège Grebmeier Forget and presented in dialogue with the exhibition Terms of Use, which is on view at the PHI Foundation from March 9 to July 9, 2023. The project consists of an installation that is accessible during the Foundation’s opening hours.

Though it is not usually regarded as participative or interactive, Grebmeier Forget’s practice is based on different mediations of the self via the image, operated through the mediums of performance or installation. Through mirrors, visual echoes, and constant passages between analog and digital realms, the artist explores the meanderings of self-representation, proposing that it is an inescapable contemporary phenomenon, both aesthetically and psychically. If Grebmeier Forget tends to place herself at the center of her works, acting as both subject and object, this public engagement project is an opportunity for the artist to open up her approach to different spectatorial postures that also oscillate between action and observation, between the unique and the replicated image, or between abstraction and figuration.

The title of the project is a nod to Claude Cahun (1894–1954), whose work includes images in which the artist is both the photographer and model. Using clothing, make-up, and poses, Cahun reframes and reimagines personal expressions of gender and, more broadly, codes of representation. Operating in the same spirit, Grebmeier Forget has conceived of an installation that will host creative group activities facilitated by the PHI Foundation’s Education Team. Guided by a performative score written by the artist, participants will produce self-portraits on mirrors, using various beauty products as pigments. Acting as ghosts of past activations, these changing traces will accumulate and remain visible to the general public, who are invited to visit our Education Room during the Foundation’s opening hours and see themselves reflected in the installation. A performance by Grebmeier Forget within the exhibition completes the project.

The artist would like to thank Julie Cusson, Claudia Fancello, Marlène Ferrari, Daniel Fiset, Amy Fung, Laurie Laroureux-Scholes, Michelle Lacombe, and Douglas Scholes.

Curator: Daniel Fiset