October 14th - 16th 2010
QUAI #1 Boston/Quebec exchange project in Performance Art

Performances:

Thursday 14th, 7-10 pm
Alexis Bellavance
Vela Phelan & Jeff Huckleberry

Friday 15 th, 7-10 pm
Dirk Adams
Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe
Celine Boucher
Alice Vogler

Laboratory: Saturday, October 16th, 12-5pm.
*Due to the small size of MEME Gallery and the number of participants, the Live Art Laboratory will take place with a limited audience.

Quebec Artists:
Celine Boucher, Alexis Bellavance and Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe

Boston Artists:
Dirk Adams, Jeff Huckleberry, Vela Phelan and Alice Vogler

Quai # 1: reciprocity, complementarily, proximity and interaction

Quais arose in early spring 2010 from my fortunate encounter with Vela Phelan and Alice Vogler, in the context of the Transmuted performance festival , in San Luis Potosi (Mexico).

Our personal and artistic affinities lead us soon to sketch the broad outlines of an exchange project, helped by common backgrounds in organizing events.Reciprocity between artists from Quebec and Boston was the keyword, spurred by geographical proximity of our home bases.
Back home, I approached a few colleagues, according to our complementarity, i.e. similarities and differences in our work. The idea was to offer to the Boston audience a representative, though limited sampling of various trends in the performance art scene of Quebec. This orientation found immediate enthusiasm among the MEME Gallery team.
As a result, Taxi!, a collective of French-speaking artists dedicated to performance, came to life. All four members of the group share aesthetical values and concerns, however each of us also have his own unique features: audio art (Alexis Bellavance), vocal art and movement (Celine Boucher), drawing and installation (Patrice Duchesne) and, in my case, textAction.
As for the Boston selection of Quai no 1, Alice and Vela went along the same lines, and we opted for a quite balanced, symmetrical programming: 2 evenings of 4 solo performances, the gallery space being successively shared by 2 groups of 2 artists from both countries.

Thus, Thursday and Friday, the Quebec team will face and mingle with their Bostonian counterparts (Dirk Adams, Jeff Huckleberry, Vela Phelan and Alice Vogler), each of them representing very distinct trends in performance.
With The Live Art Laboratory on Saturday afternoon, we intend to take the exchange notion a notch higher. In a truly experimental context, all eight participants will take over the floor at the same time, with a view to confront their own practice.

One may speculate about the results of such an intense cross-over between every participant to Quai no 1. Will the interaction give way to a mutual contamination? or to the constitution of a loose, but broader artist collective? All we know is that the experience shall be repeated at Quai no 2, in Montreal, sometime in spring 2011.
Otherwise, I wish to thank Alice, Vela and Dirk for inviting Taxi!’s members to present their works in such a highly productive and precious space as MEME Gallery.

We are seizing this opportunity with an enthusiasm all the more vivid given that the critical appraisal of colleagues from abroad, as well as the reactions of an unknown but sensible audience are essential to the evolution of any art work, but more specifically to performance art.

Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe,
Artistic coordinator,
Artists collective Taxi!

Quebec, Canada
Céline Boucher studied drawing and sculpture in U. K., and design in British Columbia before completing a M. A. degree in Drama (scenography) at Université du Québec à Montreal. Besides her teaching activities, she played since 2000 an active role in the artist-run center Vaste et Vague (Carleton \Eastern Quebec), as member or president of the Board and artistic director.

Minimalist and based on an acute awareness of present moment. Boucher’s performance art work can be termed as a search for authenticity and fundamental emotions. She developed a passion for vocal art and sound poetry, which she presents in solo pieces or accompanied by musicians Recipient of numerous grants and awards, she regularly participates in research or production residency programs in Quebec or abroad.

Alexis Bellavance studied visual and media arts at the Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM). Since 2003, he is an active figure of the Quebec audio art scene, as a member of the sound ensemble BOLD and of the production collective Perte de Signal. He has curated many projects and events, such as the international performance festival VIVA! Art action in Montreal.

Bellavance addresses themes deep-rooted in his experience of reality and its reverse. He explores the phenomenon of perception through the filter that is the human body, seizing, fixing and x-raying sounds, vibrations, images on different mediums to be transformed: audio art, photography, video installation and performance. His works have been shown in different contexts in North America, Europe and Asia.

Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe has worked successively as a journalist, actor, screenwriter, international aid worker, translator, communication consultant, university searcher and curator.

Based in Eastern Quebec since 2002, he has explored various aspects of art actuel, such as install-action, sound poetry, geo-poetical action and performance.

The intensive use of the spoken word, nonverbal languages and the ingenuous manipulation of props is what typically characterises Lapointe’s Performance Art work, “text-actions” in his own words. Highly physical, his latest series addresses personal risk-taking and responsibility of the audience.

His works have been presented in different artist-run centers, events or festivals, in Canada, United States, Mexico, Germany and Poland.

Boston, Ma USA:
Vela Phelan believes in magnifying the energy of objects, sounds and actions, blending subconscious with spirit, and allowing the unknown to present it self. Vela is a founding member of the groups Nox (0) and Gang Clan Mafia and he has performed with Jeff Huckleberry since 1999. Vela is co-creator of the Temple of Messages and co-owner and curator of MEME Gallery. He was born at 15:23:23.

Dirk Adams creates work in a variety of media including performance, sound, and installation.

Adams' work is concerned with language, memory, and culture, and frequently investigates current events, popular culture, and politics. In his live work, different modes of performance - including physical actions, explorations of social roles, casual interactions, and theatrical personas - are frequently intertwined, as is the relationship of artist-performer to audience-participant.

Adams has exhibited sound, performance, and video work in Boston at various venues including Mobius, Boston Center for the Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Sound & Noise Festival, Vancouver, BC; 3rd Encuentro Int'l de Performance CHOCOPOP - in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic; Tremor Bogota at Mapa Teatro in Bogota, Colombia, and the 10th Open Festival of Performance Art in Beijing, China. Adams holds a BA in sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MFA from Tufts University. He is a co-owner and curator of Meme Gallery in Cambridge, MA.

Alice Vogler creates work centered on the physical and mental healing processes that exist in individual’s lives and her own day-to-day life. She is interested in investigating what heals: the process, that object, or the ritual. Most recently she has been working with the element of anticipation. She has been investigating to what extent anticipation changes how time is experienced. The viewer is always an essential element in her work.

Alice received her Bachelors of Fine Arts form Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland Oregon, and her Masters of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tuffs University in Boston Massachusetts. She is currently a co-owner and curator of MEME Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has shown her work in many performance events including: Rough Trade in Chicago, Illinois, LUMEN Festival in Stanton Island, New York, Tremor Bogotá in Bogotá, Columbia, OPEN in Beijing, China, Transmuted in San Luis Potosi, Mexico and the Mobius International Festival in Boston, Ma.

Jeff huckleberry received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is the son and grandson of far more practical people, which he tries to express in his art. His spirit animal is a chicken crossed with a bear.