Karine Cossette
Boites

From June 21 to August 18, 2018
Residency on Dazibao's Instagram account
@dazibaomtl

This summer, Karine Cossette takes possession of our Instagram account!

Through a 59-day takeover of Dazibao’s Instagram account, Karine Cossette will launch a daily investigation into the nature of the cardboard box. Using a methodology suggestive of an inquest, the artist will occupy Instagram’s virtual space, free of physical limits, with a near-obsessive form of research into an object whose primary feature, paradoxically, is to contain and delineate a restricted space. At first glance, the subject of this analysis is the object: the box. But is it? Perhaps the subject is what the box hides or reveals, what it leaves to our imagination or sense of anticipation.

Supplemented daily, the narrative will develop through a set of specific actions: construct, fill, transmit, open, empty, enter, stay, exit, overpass, close, preserve, and destroy. An endless permutation of gestures to activate the empty spaces we create and fill. Container and content. A systematically binary inventory.

Boites continues a vast project entitled Voir des choses (Seeing Things), whose meaning is derived from the double sense of the expression that forms its title. Seeing things: comprehend the world around us in a concrete manner. Seeing things: to have visions, to imagine a world outside of reality. As a project, Voir des choses takes root in an index; the product of an immense collection of highly varied archival material accumulated daily by the artist: images, texts, web pages, films, artworks, etc. Boites is the first attempt to reveal what lies behind one of the many words listed in this index.

Karine Cossette is interested in the effects of consumption; both in its material evidence and in how it enters our minds. Photography, collection, writing and graphic design are the many means the artist uses to develop extensive projects such as: Mutants (2005-2013), a dystopian fable set in a parallel reality populated by discarded objects; and Voir des choses (2014-), an open platform in constant evolution, in which Boites operates as a quasi mise en abime. Karine Cossette recently completed a MFA in Visual and Media Arts at UQAM (2018), and holds a BFA in Photography from Concordia University (2011). She is the recipient of many prizes and grants and has exhibited within Canada on several occasions. She is also well know for her work as a graphic designer.