Self-portrait, Louis-Charles Dionne

 3 Questions: Artist & Curator in Conversation

1. Describe your working process as an artist.

My practice is anchored in sculpture, installation, and public art, and has evolved from foundry work; mostly with bronze and cast iron. Recently, I have been working in stone carving and installation, and I have been developing a performance collective and a collaborative curatorial practice. I reposition mundane artifacts in order to twist and question relations with everyday objects. My work reorients the material cultures around us through slight shifts in their composition, framing, and utility.

2. What was your source of inspiration for your work in the exhibition? How did the act of art-making help you in reflecting on/responding to the pandemic as an artist?

This project allows me to pursue the research initiated with my MFA thesis project, and to explore new avenues for my work. Expanding my usual material-based sculptural work, this project provides me with an opportunity to reimagine and diversify my practice, and to make my work adaptable to other modes of experience—which has proven vital since the recent paradigm shift from physical to virtual modes of creating and experiencing art.

3. How do you think visual art helps us understand the complex world around us?

Art-making as research offers great freedom in terms of the possible methods and avenues to take in examining the world around us, and to experiment with various notions, concepts, objects, gestures, and situations. Being so open-ended, it allows one to follow and to be responsive to their process. As an exercise of adaptability and resourcefulness, art-making as research (or research as art-making) offers a great balance between learning about various subjects and learning from first-hand experience.