Programming

It is with great pleasure that DARE-dare inaugurates its 1996-1997 program and its new premises (460 Sainte-Catherine West) by offering the public the project of an artist member, Lise Nantel. Through this CARTE BLANCHE, Lise Nantel invites the public into her research laboratory, installed for ten days within the walls of the gallery. Sacred Laboratories is the title of a long-term research project aiming at creating spaces of meditation in the city linked to moments of passage. After the preparatory stage of the project, presented at DARE-dare, two in situ installations will follow, the first at the Maison des naissances de Côte-des-Neiges and the second at the Maison d'Hérelle. Birth and death: two crucial and unavoidable moments of passage, two types of inalienable events in life, two kinds of inscriptions of the ritual and the sacred in the thread of existence.

Lise Nantel has always been motivated by the desire to diversify the fields of intervention of art, to open its borders, to place it outside of the conventional context. Laboratoires sacrés calls for an artistic gesture outside the studio and the gallery "to specify a social, material and imaginary territory". This project should be seen "as a desire for constant involvement of the artist at all levels of reality; it assumes an openness, an availability, an awareness as well as an absence of prejudice about materials, places and questions of art but also an attitude of respect and exchange before the expectations and needs of people with whom and for whom these installations will be conceived."

The artist has had a passion for gardens and gardening for seven years. The garden represents for her a form of installation in continuous transformation, which mobilizes and redirects her creative drive. She conceives it as a place or a protected physical space which allows the human being to take refuge, to collect himself, to recharge his batteries, to feel in resonance with the world. In this project that she initiated, the garden serves as a sort of metaphor for the notion of laboratory and as direct inspiration for the creation of places of meditation in situ. A meeting with Lise Nantel will take place at the gallery on Saturday, August 30th at 2pm.

Lise Nantel obtained her MFA from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1985. Since 1979, her career has been marked by numerous exhibitions in Quebec and Montreal (notably, Art et société in 1981 at the Musée de Québec, Art et féminisme in 1982 at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, D'hypothétiques confluences in 1983 at the Jolliet gallery in Montreal, Une chambre à soi in 1986 in Chicoutimi). In addition to participating as an artist in Textiles sismographes, in 1995, Lise Nantel was editor and coordinator of the collection of critical essays and the catalog of this event organized by the Conseil des arts textiles du Québec. A professor of visual arts since 1983, Lise Nantel currently teaches at the Université du Québec à Montréal.