B/R/T Le corps habité | The Inhabited Body / curators:
/ Jason Arsenault
/ Andrée Duchaine
Bachmann, Roussel, Tingley's Exhibition
3520, rue St-Jacques, Montréal (Québec), Canada
Wednesday to Sunday, Noon to 5 p.m. — from November 1 2007 to December 2 2007

BRT The Inhabited Body - Ingrid Bachmann, Natacha Roussel, and Jane Tingley use automata to create a viewing experience both physical and emotive. What is striking about their works is the way they use technology to address issues related to the body: the body as a sensitive environment (Tingley), the object as the body’s memory (Bachmann), and the body as movement experienced (Roussel).

These artists’ observations give rise to the various hypotheses underlying their work. They create spaces of enquiry using new media, through which they convey the complexity of the body’s experience. Here, technology is transformed from its everyday uses into works of art without idealizing its function or exploiting it in a technical demonstration. Bachmann, Roussel, and Tingley accentuate its imperfections, weaknesses, and shortcomings — akin to those of the human body. Their work suggests a body laid bare as machinery, which takes shape through the installation, objects, or the immersive environment.

In their use of electronic and mechanical systems, these three artists propose a re-examination or recognition of the body through the machine. Be it by taking the observer on a journey through the central nervous system by simulating different layers of the epidermis (Tingley), creating a tap-dance symphony for absent bodies using 27 pairs of shoes (Bachmann), or encouraging us to re-examine how we walk by means of a prosthesis in the form of mechanical legs (Roussel), the three artists demonstrate various alternative means of inhabiting the body than is possible in our everyday lives.

These robotic works invite us to immerse ourselves within their sound environments and confront our experience as viewers with the sounds of machinery. Mechanical and metallic sounds pierce the air and hypnotize us with their rhythms (Bachmann) or surprise us with their industrial qualities (Tingley and Roussel). Overall, the sound in these works has the effect of creating a sense of uncertainty on the part of those observing or listening. It is as though these machines were examining, spying or seeking, through our mere presence, to mimic our behavior. The effect of these sound environments is to continuously stimulate our attention and put us in a constant state of alert.

Today, the physical body tends to be regarded as something imperfect — too much of this, not enough of that — as if something could always be improved, corrected, or refurbished. The organic body, and by extension that of the viewer, is forced to confront the mechanical body found in these works. The machine has an aura which shapes our present-day conception of the world. It seeks, in our modern mythology, to be without fault, offering the capacity to be regulated, adjusted, and replaced as required if it is unable to perform its duties adequately. The machine amplifies the myth of perfection. With the scope of medical and technological progress today, the body is increasingly called upon to function according to these rules. We should note that these artists are not interested in rendering these body-machines perfect by glorifying them, but rather by making them slightly dysfunctional, although complete and well-made as objects and works of art, to highlight these relations between the body and the machine.

Together, these works share a desire to experience and explore technology, not in a cold and purely technical manner but rather as an experience of the unknown related to the body. They are technological works, inspired by living structures, which seek to confront and relate the organic body to the machine-body, thereby calling into question the role and functions of each.