Gabrielle Paré is Latitude 53’s artist-in-residence from December 6 - January 29, 2022.
Latitude 53
10242 – 106 Street
amiskwacîwâskahikan
Edmonton, AB, Canada
T5J 1H7
Paré is interested in the interpretation of words and images and the many ways we as humans misunderstand one another. Because we communicate with many languages —textual, visual, physical— her practice is also text-, material- and performance-based.
During her time as an artist-in-residence at Latitude 53, she will continue her practice of exploring the language of identity. This approach includes a deconstruction of colonial language or distortion of recognizable codes to shift their meanings. In a central work to her current practice, “Void if Altered” (2020), she depicts and distorts records of an official identity: a passport photo and a birth certificate. In this series of lightbox photographs, spaces are forced into the flat surface of the papers, creating bendable proof of a person. A piece of paper and a thin layer of ink is what authenticates our sex on a birth record and our biometric portraits. Yet, this is easily invalidated of intended meaning at the presence of a scratch, a misprint, or a stain. She sees the material possibilities of this “invalidation” as a liberation: an opportunity to transcend binary categories and to reveal something truer about ourselves than just our identities. In material terms, she blurs and bends and smudges at the edges of things to remember that understanding is movable.