Gut'er to Bleed
Corinne Duchesne
December 03 - February 02, 2013
Gut'er & Bleed is domestic the way that crazy-quilts and home-deaths are domestic. The work developed slowly and in the dark - as if the itch on your back that you can never reach suddenly grew into a third arm.
It began simply as a doodle around a prep list for my next painting but quickly spread, engulfing my imagination like a swarm of bees. The protagonist, Dïq, is a genderless being faced with the existential question of how to communicate with its mother, who has lapsed into a coma. Dïq begins by awkwardly reading poetry to the mother's decomposing body, but soon realizes that her ears have closed and her eyes no longer see. The works then fall into a stream of consciousness, drawings and captions cataloging internal dialogue. Flat image drawings mix with pop-up pages and abandoned or reclaimed fragments while characters, symbols, and totem animals writhe or dance across the drawings, all morphing and twisting through a memoir of visual addiction and homeless, restless love.
Bio
Corinne Duchesne has exhibited across Canada and internationally in the United States, South Korea, and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions in Canada includeStories to Myself (2008), Of Angels and Demons(2009), In Memorandum (2010), and Transformation is an Ambiguous Condition (2011). Duchesne is currently engaged in the forthcoming project Reflections and Illuminations: An Ekphrastic Collaboration in Art, Music, and Poetry with composer Garrett Hope and poet Jill Johnson to be exhibited at the Berman Museum of Art, in Collegeville, PA. Currently, Duchesne is a fulltime Drawing Professor at Sheridan College School of Animation Arts and Design in the Visual and Creative Arts Program and is a recent recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Mid-Career Artist Grant. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, having studied abroad at the Off-Campus Program in Florence Italy with Tom Lapierre.