Ines Doujak, Pablo Lafuente and Alessandro Marques
Sans Peau / No Skin
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
January 30, 2016 – April 16, 2016
www.sbcgallery.ca

At the vernissage of Sans Peau / No Skin, a girl about four years old runs through the gallery, weaving in and out of legs, clutching a sculpture from the exhibition. The artists and visitors laugh and continue their conversations in English, French and Portuguese. Sans Peau / No Skin is not meant to be stagnant, but rather bend toward and mold itself around the people who interact with it. It is a fluid, barrierless microcosm, like the jellyfish, known as “água-viva”, living water, in Brazilian Portuguese.

This conception of blurring the substance and the space, for the jellyfish who is succumbed in water to become water itself, is the starting point for artists Ines Doujak, Pablo Lafuente and Alessandro Marques. Their collaboration was a response to the existentialist philosophy of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector in Água Viva. They absorbed Lispector’s seemingly untouchable ideas of nature and the passage of time, and answered with the most tactile medium: fabric.

The artists covered walls, boxes, and strange human forms in chita, a popular fabric from northeastern Brazil that is characterised by bright floral imagery. SBC Gallery is once again transformed by their focus program, to another world, to another home.

The three artists are Brazilian, but currently spread out across the globe. There was long-distance discussion and creation before their meeting in Montréal, but nothing came ready-made. The exhibition’s realisation occurred in the two weeks of daily work in the gallery space, and continues to occur through its run-time as fabric corpses are moved and textiles are touched. Sans Peau / No Skin is a translation of one country and culture to another, and a balancing act of artistic practices that share a heritage.

SBC Gallery is hosting events in conjunction with the exhibition: for February 24’s Nuit Blanche, experience workshops in percussion, capoeira and a textile laboratory from 8 pm to 2 am.