Renowned for her video and installation work, multidisciplinary artist Manon Labrecque explores the very medium of the book with this new title from Les portables collection. The artist re-thinks the image through a conceptual appropriation of the format of the book, its space and various components.

In 9 ½ x 6 ¾, Labrecque literally embodies the book by means of her own body. It is as though the artist has chosen to create a performance within the conceptual space of the book with the intention to challenge or divert the very boundaries of the medium.

With noteworthy ingenuity, Labrecque uses the materiality of the publication in order to develop its content. The pages, the binding, the sewing, the folding, and the covers contribute much more than simply carrying the book’s iconography: they are transformed into significant elements, which impact our reading and understanding of the images. Labrecque subverts and plays with the formal and physical boundaries of the book to lead us toward an unexpected elsewhere, to an opening where an underlying story is being created, under the metaphorical cover of the gap, the fissure and the fold.

In this universe where the book is hardly capable of containing and revealing everything, the images run from one page to the next, the flight of the white pages needs to be restrained, the images slide beyond their space while the folding, like a suture, tries to keep a hold of it all when it doesn’t swallow it whole.