Renée Gagnon mounts language, which is sound and image, mounts image, which is language, mounts sound, which is image, into a complex montage. In compositing the fragmentary, the voicing of her texts becomes cinematic, the music of her visual bearings, a long and undulating collage.
Gagnon’s texts are elastic, pulling and releasing; puncturing, punctuated and textural. Her performative repetition is melodic, denying sameness while moulding a scape, a sounding of mounting montage, maintained and sustained, mountaining and unmounted, texted fragmented rep.
Some of her projects implicate popular icons, such as Steve McQueen and Mister T, verbing their actions, creating an active langage that investigates the making of their iconicity. Her Symphonie des carabines, composed and improvised in five parts from samples of westerns featuring Steve McQueen, is a complex melodic opus played by the galloping of hooves, neighing, gun fire, bar conversations. Here we are urged into the violent seductive “west”, into our fall for its imagined promise, our fascination with our own fierce draw.
Montage/collage/extension/distension
Renée Gagnon mounts language, which is sound and image, mounts image, which is language, mounts sound, which is image, into a complex montage. In compositing the fragmentary, the voicing of her texts becomes cinematic, the music of her visual bearings, a long and undulating collage.
Gagnon’s texts are elastic, pulling and releasing; puncturing, punctuated and textural. Her performative repetition is melodic, denying sameness while moulding a scape, a sounding of mounting montage, maintained and sustained, mountaining and unmounted, texted fragmented rep.
Some of her projects implicate popular icons, such as Steve McQueen and Mister T, verbing their actions, creating an active langage that investigates the making of their iconicity. Her Symphonie des carabines, composed and improvised in five parts from samples of westerns featuring Steve McQueen, is a complex melodic opus played by the galloping of hooves, neighing, gun fire, bar conversations. Here we are urged into the violent seductive “west”, into our fall for its imagined promise, our fascination with our own fierce draw.