Master’s Residency, Vincent Isabel
Vincent Isabel
2024-26 Master’s Residency
« This project is an installation combining electronic components, found objects, and organic materials, linking the artwork and the body through a shared language: electricity. It brings us back to those invisible rules and phenomena that connect us to the earth and desacralizes the body’s position in relation to matter. A communication forms between every element, whether living or non-living, to create a noisy soundscape. It is a form of testimony to the logics inhabiting objects through the deterioration of their material under different environments.
The devices will be performed, where gestures and movements embody the mythology of a dysfunctional cyborg. Through interaction with untamable and unpredictable instruments, it seeks a reconstructed identity in continuous adaptation. It will be noisy and silent, formless and full of errors through these instruments assembled from scratch.
My process is rooted in a DIY ethic: instability and chance are creative drivers and accepted phenomena in the making and performing of these devices. This stems from a desire to navigate technological system errors and the false movements resulting from these situations, allowing them to express themselves. It is also a rapprochement of crafts such as ceramics and jewelry with new forms of electronic craftsmanship. All of this takes shape as interactive sculptures and noise machines. »
About
Vincent Isabel is a tinkerer, sound artist, and performer based in Quebec. His practice explores the web of relationships and myths between the body, environment, and technologies. He uses assemblages of electrical circuits, rescued objects, and organic materials to create noise instruments and systems. Within these, he provokes and tames loss of control as a driving force for performance; spaces of error and glitch become moments of poetry, challenging the dynamics of control between the human and the non-human. This body of work and performances proposes alternative imaginaries and relationships with technological objects, and a return to their materiality.
He works in a handcrafted, DIY manner, playing with the arrangement of raw materials and new media. He also leads workshops on electronic DIY, programming, and the use of microcontrollers. Graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Emily Carr University in 2024, Vincent is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Visual Arts at Université Laval and collaborates with the Avatar center as part of a master’s residency in an artist-run center.
About the Master's Residency
Each year, Avatar awards a residency to a Master’s student in Visual Arts at Université Laval. Throughout their two years of study, the student enjoys unlimited access to Avatar’s spaces and equipment to complete their master’s project. This initiative is made possible through a collaboration with the School of Art at Université Laval.
