Yanik Potvin: Smokescreen, 2019
Smokescreen is a minimalist installation of ceramic objects, video projection and images that are culturally distant in time and space. The misappropriation of cultural objects, the understanding of their representation and their contextualization in today’s world underscore a diffraction. A distant gaze that seeks to compare different entities in search of analogies and differences. What we have in common is our ability to differentiate ourselves.
Artifacts:
• Atia’ta’tase, which means “turning inward” in Wendat language, is a large native vase made of coils (such as those found by archaeologists in northeastern North America), riddled with English porcelain trinkets. Demonstrating the culture shock of two different clay-working contexts.
• Make Antiquity Great Again! (Gode+Jezeh), is a diptych consisting of a scale replica of the Giza Sphinx, but with the head swapped for that of Jesus Christ. The second part is a golden dildo to the scale of Rocco Sifredi, but the head has been swapped with that of Pharaoh Kephrem. In different eras, and in different places, the hegemony of power is a masculine affair, and its transfer is divine. Fortunately, the world is changing. FOR THE LOVE OF GODE!
• Rococo Siffredi is a video projection of distant artistic temporalities. The rituals surrounding completely different aesthetic niches – West Coast death metal scene, Upper Paleolithic cave art and Rococo decorative objects – are superimposed to produce a new cultural accumulation. A more transparent diffraction of what we can be!
Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGf-hLFlz4
SMOKESCREEN, 2019, woodfired ceramics, gold luster, digital prints, video projection, audio sampling, sand, ink, Stonehenge paper, Crayola. Galerie d’art du CEGEP de Jonquière, Saguenay, QC., Canada.
Photo credits: Valérie Lavoie
