
Ingrédients pour un univers fait maison

The works: 8 sculptures and approximately 10 Algorithmic drawings exhibited simultaneously at the Maison de la Culture Parc Extension, and the Conseil des Arts de Montréal in 2018.
A selection of the pieces were re-built for a show at the Maison de la Culture de Notre-Dame-de-Grâce in 2020.
This series marked the end of my obsession with robot building. It also marked the first time that I exhibited a drawings series on their own.
Drawing had always been central, a slightly manic extension of thought, a form of research and prototyping…but I’d never considered it as something I could show in a gallery.
The construction processes were intuitive experiments generated through rule sets dictating which materials I could use (found, donated, salvaged from older pieces,) and which actions I could take (number of turns, jig construction, etc.) I experimented with simple circuits and surface transducers; with cast-off materials: rope, belts, easter eggs filled with metal shards, dressmaker’s rivets, bicycles, bags of leather, aluminum underground cable… woven, bolted, riveted, dyed, sewn, crocheted, programmed and drawn into large suspended structures that rattled, shook and shivered.


Not all the experiments were successful: I wanted to see if I could use a drawing as part of a simple circuit, (after all, graphite conducts electricity). But even the drawings completely saturated with soft graphite conducted such minute amounts of electricity they were totally unreliable as electrodes, and could not be incorporated into circuitry even as random noise generators. They remained aesthetic objects.
I realize I was privileging methodology, searching for material ingredients that could be manipulated into outgrowths of aesthetic sensuousness…to find a grammar.
In September of 2018, I spent a lot of time fiddling with the gallery installation, I had the uncanny experience of being able to watch people watch my work. This included daily school visits and group tours of new immigrants enrolled in the Francisation classes upstairs from the gallery. As an old immigrant, and an artist usually locked alone in her studio, it made me wonder about the possibilities of collaboration, or even how to delight and puzzle viewers. It led me to a re-evaluation of what I could do, how to get them (and myself) to move, at least a little, beyond the expectations (Yeah, but does it work? What does it mean? What is it supposed to do?) and limitations of both digital creation and techno-consumption.
When the pieces were shown again in 2019-2020 the world changed. They spent the duration of COVID locked away and I was grateful the Maison de Culture de Notre-Dame-de-Grâce extended the show long enough for people to see it.






























Algorithmic drawings

The drawings’ rules…
…were slightly more arbitrary: “build a jig, make precise lines every 1/4” along a horizontal axis till the pencil is worn to a stub, rotate, re-align, repeat.” Or: “Fold a sheet of paper the size of a table till it fits in your pocket, clamp in a vice, dye with pigment, allow to dry, unfold, re-fold, dye, allow to dry, unfold, create a drawing in silver ink, re-fold, soak in water, clamp, let dry.”
…and not universal, because I also included a re-worked version of the paper ship, both flattened in la maison de culture de Parc extension, and later suspended as a paper sculpture in la Maison de Culture de Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Botrel (2019-2020).
























The end of robot-building
…So summer of 2016 I built a couple of simple 14” x 18” robot testing platforms, intending, (thanks to the generous support of the MAI’s mentorship program) to work with a coder to explore basic robot navigation, wireless data communication, and more robust electronic assembly and signal isolation strategies.
But… as the summer ended and my little motorized wood-and-plexi platforms roamed autonomously through my studio, happily avoiding walls, scattered junk and confused chihuahuas, I knew something was off…I’d simply replicated, on a very small scale, the usual forms of production and consumption I’d intended to criticize.
I was initially drawn to DIY robot-building because of their heroic or neurotic charge in our culture. And honestly, a kind of bulldog-stubborn sense of the absurd fun of figuring out everything from code to custom machining hardware on my own. What else is access to graduate school labs and machine shops for?
In any case, robots have a hold on our contemporary imaginary, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. I thought I could upend them with a digitally-mediated maximalist materiality… or to put it another way… to be a bottom feeder on industrial production in order to hack apart the idea of what a robot could be. But, as I finished the small prototypes, I realized I upended nothing.
At first it was fun, but…I couldn’t shake that sense that I wasn’t critiquing, just adding to dross pile of technophilic and techno-dooming tropes of the Anthropocene. Bleah.
It’s not the machine, or technology, I’m rejecting, I’m in love with lathes and lube, pulleys and rivets, microcontrollers and simple circuits. I love science fiction.
I don’t love the scripted visions of tech-industry and law that dictate and limit how we organize all our endeavors, including our communities, including farms, including gardens.
We’re already primed with set reactions and expectations when confronted with an electronic/digital object. It may be a mysterious black box whose inner workings we don’t understand, but it’s also very familiar, necessary. It’s already a consumer product in “smart” homes, managing shopping lists, locks and heating, it is already a wealthy tech-savvy child’s toy, or a classroom aid.
Whatever I made, its identity would be that of a gadget in a world of gadgets already promising indulgence, or novelty, or some nebulous safer/happier/more-creative future possible only through acceptance proprietary monocultures.
Unless my project consisted of an ironic manipulation of that very script…which it didn’t, I had to find another approach. It also crystallized the notion for me that it is not function, but dysfunction, within slowness, openness… in fact, between old and new technologies where my preoccupations lie.