FRÉDÉRIQUE LALIBERTÉ

"This endeavor to foresee the interiors as precisely as possible. To picture them exhaustively through the folding of pieces of paper before being able to set them up in space really. A practice of anticipation. This place was activated (visualized), known, before it actually unfolded in real life.

Isn’t there something wavy about this wall?

Outside, something that sounds and looks like a storm. Here, images are displayed as accounts of things which are taking place here.

we appreciate, it is pleasant

grandiosity and prestige, nice looking objects in nice looking spaces

luxurious places, disgusting configuration

(modernity symbol social prestige aspiration, said this architect)

these interiors, emblems of our frenzy to ornament our fear

To protect oneself from the outside the walls and what we glue onto them partitioning apparatuses acting surfaces things are fine.

spatial perception and nausea

how fragile are our constructions

Here is an exhibition but it is an installation, but it is a decoration but if something was taking place here one could think this place as a theatre set. The plan is to make an imitation of a horrible place. Clean. Sanitary. Artificial. Barricaded. An interior that is better to be wary of."

- Frédérique Laliberté, 2022

In the sprawling installation Un lieu vide où il ne se passe rien, Frédérique Laliberté plays with notions of interior and exterior by using the wall, as both a concept and a construction. In a combination of handmade and digital processes, Laliberté’s installation inhabits FOFA Gallery’s Main Space, Black Box, and the Ste-Catherine Vitrine in an endeavour to bring to life a place that was “activated (visualized), known, before it actually unfolded in real life.” Papier mâché architecture and patterns coexist, first in the artist’s mind and slowly on a physical plane. Here, the artist engages with excess and ornamentation to offer an unfolding and uncanny experience that probes conventions of taste, luxury, and safety. Un lieu vide où il ne se passe rien is a contradictory theatre set, a representation meant to be seen from a distance, but also a permeable and precarious place for the audience to enter and take shelter from the dangers of the outside world. Laliberté’s publication, Un lieu vide anticipé (2020), sets the stage for the narrative and material explorations in the exhibition and will be available for sale in the gallery.