Icebreaker, 2013

Diane Landry - Quebec City, Canada

Kinetic Sculpture

Since 1998 Diane Landry has worked on what she calls “mouvelle” artworks, which she describes as a material work that must be watched for some time before its full meaning is grasped. A mouvelle work exists in a continually renewed flow of time, i.e., a space-time continuum imposed by its very nature. The mouvelle works often involve everyday materials like plastic, record turntables, toys, umbrellas and ice skates. What remains constant in these ever-evolving and shifting works is Landry herself and the endurance-based performances that are created to completely transform her materials into time and movement.

Icebreaker sets up an impossible situation, a boat hovering in mid-air, with water seemingly flowing around it. A ghost ship with a single rower, a feat of time, endurance and gravity. With each stroke of the paddles the “water” ripples, quickly revealing that the paddles do not enter the water, rather they are attached, inextricably linked to each other. Icebreaker is a balancing act, one requiring intense concentration, here exhibited on the rower's face. There also exists serenity, a result of rowing in the sky, which is enhanced by the absurdity of that gesture, because the boat never advances an inch.

Diane Landry lives and works in Quebec City. She received a BA in Visual Arts from Laval University, Quebec, in 1987 and an MFA from Stanford University, California in 2006. She has exhibited and performed extensively in Canada, USA, Europe, China and Australia. In 2009, the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec published a monograph marking the first retrospective exhibition, The Defibrillators. Her first American retrospective The Cadence of All Things was on view in 2013 at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC (USA).

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vimeo.com/66499356

95

PwC Tower

18 York Street (Installation viewed from outside through windows)

This project is both indoors and outdoors.