Chantal Rousseau - HISTORIETTES

MARCH 2 - APRIL 7. 2007

Artist Talk and Opening: Friday, March 2, 7pm

Historiettes constists of five animation projects, very short, concise narratives with no beginnings or endings. Each work pares a story down to its essential parts: characters, duration, cause and effect. It is a strategy that uses reduction as a guiding principal and is effected on both the content and the style of the animations through shortening, simplifying and stripping down.

The animations modestly explore the narrative tropes of sex and death. Each is a thinly veiled metaphor for human relationships, with birds acting as stand-ins. The sexual imagery situates the work within the feminist critique of representation (e.g. the discourse of the "gaze"), yet privileges a fluid interplay between sexual and non-sexual signifiers.

When viewed together, Historiettes allows the viewer to engage in semantic interplay. The configuration of the monitors influences this process of comparison and elliptical play between the individual animations. While there is no overarching narrative, each animation subtly inflects the reading of the others. This interpretative activity is open-ended and the structure allows for the viewer to engage in this process.