Curator: Marie Fraser
From September 7 to October 20, 2007. Opening on Friday September 7 at 7:30 pm.
An exhibition produced by VOX and presented as part of the 10th event of the Mois de la Photo à Montréal.
biographY
Le Mois de
la Photo à Montréal present an exhibition
gathering the works of the artist Candice Breitz around
the theme "Replaying Narrative".
In her photography, video, and other artworks Candice
Breitz uses popular imagery as a catalyst to expose
the absurdity of how we construct meaning through stereotypes.
Through humorous and subversive tactics Breitz strikes
out at visual and narrative conventions in film and
popular culture. To reveal the essence of our fascination
with superstars, The Soliloquy Trilogy (2000),
a three-screen video projection, juxtaposes clips of
Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, Clint Eastwood
in Dirty Harry and Jack Nicholson in The
Witches Of Eastwick. Her video Aiwa to Zen
(2003) will also be presented.
Mois
de la Photo à Montréal Web site
Candice Breitz Press release (PDF)
Biographical Notice Born in Johannesbourg, South Africa, in 1972. Lives
and works in Berlin, Germany. Exhibiting internationally since the mid-1990s, Candice
Breitz has produced a substantial body of installation
videos that examine stereotypes and visual conventions
in film and popular culture. Her heavily edited videos
often incorporate found-film segments. Clipping and
reordering them, she produces new dialogue situations
that speak of gender-based social and cultural stereotypes.
For the Soliloquy Trilogy (2000), Breitz isolated
a single protagonist from three different films by “cutting
and pasting” every scene in which that protagonist
speaks. The actors – Clint Eastwood (Dirty
Harry), Jack Nicholson (The Witches of Eastwick)
and Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct) – are
thereby made to deliver soliloquies that were never
originally intended. This editing procedure dispenses
with the storylines of the source films and forces the
actors to speak directly to their viewers. The limited
evolution of the actors’ roles throughout these
edited films transforms the iconic Hollywood figures
into stereotypes of themselves. In Aiwa to Zen
(2003), Breitz tackled her own cultural biases. Prior
to a visit to Japan, she listed the 150 Japanese words
that she was familiar with. Once in Japan, she invited
a small cast of Japanese actors to act out, employing
only those words, sketches based on their daily lives.This
very limited vocabulary was composed mainly of terms
related to Japanese cuisine, consumer goods and pop
culture.The resulting scenes, basically mimed stories
devoid of any semiotic coherence, embody in oral terms
the simplistic image of Japan that exists beyond its
own borders and, as such, represent it as ultimately
imagined by outsiders.
www.candicebreitz.net