Presented as part of Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics, a city-wide public art exhibition in Ottawa running from July-November 2019, featuring five new commissions by Ottawa artists at four outdoor locations. The exhibition was the culmination of a year-long commissioning program, which ran simultaneously with the Video in the Public Sphere speaker series featuring international artists and scholars who spoke Knot Project Space and at times ran workshops and seminars. More info about the project can be found here.
Open Water
For Open Water, Lefebvre examined the subject of winter, giving intense focus to the temporarily frozen Ottawa River, known in these unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territories as Kichi sipi, literally “big river”. For a sustained six months, Lefebvre revisited the same precise location upon the river at regular intervals to perform observational, sensorial, and physical field research, ultimately translating her explorations into video form through the hand-held camerawork of Robert Cross.
Through her process of retracing the contours of a singular site, Lefebvre developed a vocabulary of movement that has embodied her relation to the shifting behaviors of the river ice. Central to her approach to the place was the artist’s desire to cross from one side of the river to the other, producing strategies for movement that took form as flat horizontal crawling — scaling and pressing against the vast, opaque terrain. As winter progressed, Lefebvre’s movement’s became increasingly propelled by an inescapable sense of urgency: as spring approached, her possibilities for action and crossing were growing thinner, with the stability of the river fragmenting and surrendering to the coming heat. The result is a video that over its duration describes a slow seasonal transition, accompanied by a lush sonic treatment that covers an equally expansive auditory spectrum, from micro-sounds of the body to the deep, distal rumbling of the sub-level current. Through a polarized treatment of scale and time, Lefebvre opens up an unsettled affective territory that is both determined and precarious – committing to a fiction that is slowly getting real.
Hélène Lefebvre
Based in Ottawa, Canada, Hélène Lefebvre’s practice is an inquiry into identity and alterity, all the while weaving links between visual art, culture, and society. The body in movement and sensorial active listening (epicentre of performance action) have been sustained interests of hers since Les Moissons in 2009. Recently, her work has taken the form of performance, installation and video. Her practice in corporeality takes inspiration from studies in visual art, contemporary dance, and authentic movement—a form in which improvisation is central.
Related Programming
Discussion: Hélène Lefebvre in Dialogue with Jean-Michel Quirion. August 8, 2019. Knot Project Space.