Marion Lessard
Doublures

From January 31 to March 21, 2020
Opening on January 30 at 7 pm

Marion Lessard is personified by five individuals: Jean-Nicolas Léonard, Alice Roussel, Élisabeth M. Larouine, Marie Cherbat-Schiller and Claude Romain. Five individuals whose distinctive personalities bring out humanistic forms of knowledge as well as adjoining or complementary and sometimes antagonistic disciplines. Marion Lessard is these five people but none of them can aspire to be the equivocal Marion Lessard.

In a complex meshing where art, work, public and private life meet, the Marion Lessard Collective weaves an integral and unified creative fabric, sustained by numerous ramifications and paradoxes. Their research manifests through video, literary works, drawings, and performances which question, in the gesture itself of making art, that mysterious construction which is identity, both collective and individual.

While Doublures might appear to be drawing on the canonical Vertigo, mainly for themes such as the double and the sensation of disequilibrium to which it gives rise, it is also a work that brings out the motif of an almost telescopic artistic process in which nothing is more plausible than the implausible and where the concept of the author is unremittingly shaken. Between the remake, the making of and the original work, Doublures shows five key moments of Vertigo brought into the present day by the five members of the Marion Lessard Collective, directed by five different filmmakers whose work is carefully documented. Here, fiction and documentary are interlocked in a philosophical quest for authenticity.

Marion Lessard studied philosophy at the Université de Montréal and holds a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Concordia University, where she is currently completing a master’s degree. Since 2018, their academic work and artistic projects have received support through several grants. The Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery and DARE-DARE in Montreal and Verticale in Laval have recently shown the work of the Marion Lessard Collective. Artist’s books, performances and interventions, along with special events such as the Symposium Congressiste de la Conférence de Colloque (2017 and 2018) occur recurrently in the collective’s work. Marion Lessard will be in residence until 2022 at the Darling Foundry, and Doublures is their first major solo exhibition.