Marie-Claude Gendron in Paspébiac

I can no longer recall.
Not the time, not the day.

I remember the light, the boats and that young couple on the beach who slept the afternoon away.

We would have liked to do the same.

To sleep.

The tide has certainly, again, veiled our waking life.

– Marie-Claude Gendron, August 2020

Time’s out | Temps fluide is an act of contemplation dedicated to the sea, the one that looks at us indisputably better than we do.

Carried out in two phases, Marie-Claude Gendron’s long-term performative intervention consists in a continuous presence on an installation of her design. Thus, first undertaken at the Douglastown beach, then at the Barachois beach in Matane in the summer of 2020, five intercessions were filmed and photographed by Louis Rivest-Hénault, who also took part in the technical realization of this unlikely raft. With both engaged in a practice of the possible, the artists deployed their energies in order to document an act of contemplation evoking the incessant movement of the tide, but equally the current and inevitable rise in sea levels.

Through a multidisciplinary approach in action art, visual arts and media arts, Marie-Claude Gendron attempts to identify the patterns of a community that is constantly actualizing itself in the public, private and intimate spheres. She considers the potential of the archive and of ruin through action and spatial settings that she sometimes presents as “tableaux vivants.” In the order of raw commemoration, her projects highlight the inevitable transformation of the existing. She is interested in the multiple possibilities of the book-object and various forms of poetry in action.