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To Leave and to Take is an installation itinerary evoking notions of food and shelter through the use of objects, lights and video projections.
The viewers enter a dark space where 2,400 "rice hands" (rice-filled transparent gloves) are scattered and piled up to create makeshift "shelters" reminiscent of trenches or piles of human members.
They walk carefully in this "mine field" trying not to step on the hands and on the rice grains spilling out of them. They are surrounded by a repetitive movement : a giant projected hand moving rice from one pile to another. Through an illusion, it seems as if the hand is moving the rice from a far-away wall to a nearer one and from a wall to a column.
In an "inner room", the viewers face two women. The first is lying in the street of a "third world" country and eating, the second is eternally grinding some substance. This video projection covers the entire wall and feels like a window towards the "elsewhere".
Both women and hands appear to be monumental due to the large size of the video projections.
The entire space is lit to appear to be surrounded by a landscape of mountains where viewers' shadows are cast. This creates a tension between interior and exterior and adds another kind of space to the actual space, where the viewers walk, and the elsewhere, where the women have been videotaped.
To Leave and to Take was first shown at Oboro, Montréal, Quebec, Canada, September - October 1997. Curator : Valérie Lamontagne. |
