Misinformed Informants: SLOW READERS, argument n°1

My art explores social, historical, and familial links through pictorial structures, tools and performance acts, converging place, action, material and time, which catalyzes an exchange from inhabitant to participant and utilizes precise gestures and rhizomatic metaphors. My work elaborates on new connections between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ and is compulsively led by my need to reconfigure borders and identities.

Every performance that I have presented is based on the idea of what is lost in reconstitution. I am interested in how a subjective interpretation of a historical or familial event can be transformed into an abstracted, conceptualized piece of work. My performances are intimate scenes and are influenced by the context of their creation, whether it is through the relationship that I share with a public or through an intimate, individual interaction. 

The performance SLOW READERS, argument n°1 relates to the hidden messages that we can find within spiritual lyrics from the mid 19th century. I take as an example the song “Steal Away to Jesus” composed by Wallace Willis around 1862. That song represents how the spiritual aspect was abstractly coded for the purpose of clandestine communication. I wish to investigate these residual fragments of communication through nervous gesture and minimal voice interplay. 

Canada
https://www.guillaumeadjutorprovost.com/

Guillaume Adjutor Provost is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator who experiments with forms of exhibition, collections, text, and curation. His artistic practice is motivated by a desire to update what has long existed on the periphery of dominant historical discourses: class consciousness, counter-culture, vernacular imagery – notably folklore and Quebec applied arts – and experiences of queerness. Guillaume Adjutor sees creation as a tool for ideation and projection; creating works – material or immaterial – reminds us of the humanist ideal of a life marked by experimentation, freedom, and critical thinking.

Recipient of grants from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman scholarship, as well as a finalist for the Pierre-Ayot prize of the city of Montreal in 2016 and in 2019, the projects of Guillaume Adjutor Provost have been presented in individual and group exhibitions, notably at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2020/2021), at Caravansérail, Rimouski (2019), at the Fonderie Darling, Montreal (2019), at the Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal (2019/2018), at Bikini, Lyon (2018), at Diagonale, Montreal (2017), at Bolit Center Art Contemporani, Girona, Catalunya (2017), at Center Clark, Montreal (2016), at Galerie de la rue des Étables, Bordeaux (2015), at the Christoph Merian Foundation, Basel, Switzerland (2015). at Ve.Sch, Vienna, Austria (2014), at the Couvent des Récollets, Paris (2012).