May 20 14h – 15:30
WIP, 3487 Boul. Saint-Laurent
Roundtable discussion about labor and capitalism in print art.
Moderated by Emmanuelle Jacques, with the participation of Alvaro, Marie Samuel Levasseur
Creation of Wealth / Labour of Love is an artist’s book that takes the form of a currency in effigy of artists who combine their profession with their role as mothers. Artist Emmanuelle Jacques drew the portraits of about forty of them while discussing the impact of motherhood on their artistic practice. Long confined to a parallel economy, mothers and artists have developed essential expertise to imagine alternatives to capitalism. Emmanuelle Jacques is inspired by it to compose the texts of her book. Through a relational approach, she then uses this symbolic currency to interfere on the fringes of the art market and traditional distribution networks, and weave a community where economic exchanges and artistic creation would be means of taking care of the each other. For this round table, the artist invited Alvaro and Marie Samuel Levasseur to discuss the ways in which they approach, in their respective practices, certain themes at the heart of the Creation of Wealth / Labour of Love project: power, hierarchies, privileges, care, collaboration, slowness, and this, through the prism of the printed arts.
Emmanuelle Jacques is an undisciplined visual artist. Her practice comes from drawing and the printed arts, and notably combines writing and relational art. Her work is mostly presented in the form of an artist’s book or installation, and sometimes in other forms such as performance, video or audio art. Her recent projects have led her to take an interest in the economy, invisible work, feminist movements, DIY culture, self-management, care practices, motherhood and utopias.
A committed artist involved in different communities, Marie Samuel Levasseur collaborates, resists, reveals and repairs through the practice of chatting. A hyper-diversified multidisciplinary approach, the collaborative chat highlights the relevance of using multiplicity, micro-narrative and the hidden to account for the plurality of identities in the expression of self-narratives linked to trauma and striking experiences.
Alvaro is a Canadian-Brazilian visual artist and designer who works and lives in the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation, Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Visual arts researcher presently taking master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM, Alvaro investigates potential ways to transform persistent colonial symbols in the Brazilian collective imagination. For this, using printing arts techniques such as screen printing, stamping and stencil to divert Euro-centric representations of the colonies in America, especially Brazil. Inspired and nourished by the early 20th century Brazilian art movement, self-titled Anthropophagous Movement (1928, O. d’Andrade), Alvaro explores the potentials of symbolic transformations that emerge from a hybridizing practice in print art.
