Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/24/2024 - 06/28/2024
12:00 am
Location
Buffalo Arts Studio
Categories
Opening Reception, Friday, May 24, 2024, 5:00—8:00 pm
Part of M&T Bank 4th Friday @ Tri-Main Center
Tangible Images
Curatorial essay by Shirley Verrico
“What is a waiting room? One chair, or two, or many. Or maybe only a piece of tape on the floor to mark where the waiting begins. There, we are waiting for something. For a train to arrive, for a number to appear on a screen, for our name to be called, for a dear friend to meet us. We are suspending ourselves in time and in space.
These spaces are often neglected, overlooked. They are in-between spaces, buffer spaces. The typical waiting room is not generally inviting. It’s loud and uncomfortable, the magazine piles are from a long time ago. Or, on the contrary, peculiar attention is given. Drinks and snacks are served, ambient music is playing and comfy seating is available. But this type of waiting room is rare.” Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge
As the hour turns blue is an installation stemming from Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge’s long-term research project on the nuanced realms of waiting spaces. The installation brings together multiple elements such as large format prints, assemblages of photographic images, multiple screens, and even a waiting room corner, all interacting within the gallery space. At the heart of the installation is a 60-minute video projection, acting as a clock by looping back every hour on the hour, and taking the form of desktop performance, contemplative collage, and meditation on time passing. The video is installed in the corner of the gallery painted bright blue, an echo to the blue of an idle screen, with industrial carpet squares reminiscent of airport flooring, complete with table-bench seating. Her projects involve closely observing the physical spaces she and her collaborators inhabit, whether it’s the details of a dusty waiting room plant, the texture and wood grain of her desktop, or the corner of sky to be seen from a small window. Combining short stories, interviews, reconstructed environments, landscapes, objects, and visual poems, Leblanc-Roberge plays with four familiar waiting room elements: screens, chairs, plants, and time, each becoming chapters for the larger project.
Leblanc-Roberge’s art practice is anchored by images captured with a camera and printed on various materials, projected onto walls, bound into books, wrapped around objects, positioned intentionally in a room, and even reflected onto polished floors. Her process allows her to translate and retranslate the images across various technologies, accepting and even amplifying the subtle changes that occur during mediation. Leblanc-Roberge’s work investigates how we appropriate, occupy, and mark the structures we live and work in. She incorporates Trompe-l’œil and camouflage techniques, double-takes, and shifting points of view as a method for destabilizing and involving the whole body into the experience of viewing the work. Leblanc-Roberge’s projects often weave together site-specificities, personal narratives, fictions, coincidences, and an awareness of the absurd.
As the hour turns blue celebrates rather than critiques the non-productive moments made of hesitation, latency, nothing, possible disconnection, escape, inattention, drift, stillness, uncertainty, and privilege. Through this work, Leblanc-Roberge invites us to do nothing, to stop, to sit, to be bored, to slow down, to learn, and to observe with new attention.
Artist Biography
Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge (she/her) is an image maker from Canada and currently serves as an Associate Professor of Art and Lens Based Media at the University of Rochester (Rochester, New York). Leblanc-Roberge has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the University of Rochester and participated in multiple artist-in-residence programs across continents to produce multifaceted and collaborative projects published as books, videos, zines, exhibitions, performances, and/or ephemeral installations. She completed her BFA in photography at Concordia University (Montréal, Canada) and her MFA in electronic integrated arts at Alfred University (Alfred, New York).
The artist would like to thank Visual Studies Workshop for the loan of the bench, as well as the Canada Council for the Art and the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester for supporting portions of the production of this multi-year project.