Le Bouclier magique
Diane Landry
Diane Landry developed The Magic Shield at Avatar and at Montreal’s Oboro New Media Lab in 2005. The installation was first presented at Oboro before coming to Musée de la civilisation for Folie/Culture’s Espaces bidules, an Avatar copresentation.
The Magic Shield is a sound installation with automation and video projection. It is made of three bedframes, each draped with a white covering. The thin sheets served as screens for an assortment of mechanical paraphernalia built into the structure of the beds. Under them can be seen a skein of strings tensing and relaxing like ligaments in tandem with the movement of the bed’s wings. Their rising and falling lends an eerie weightlessness to the paper bedsheets. The three beds seemed to go from resting to waking, object to event, life to death, in a moment.
Diane Landry lives and works in Quebec City. She first studied natural science technology and worked in an agricultural research center for 5 years. At the age of 25, she decided to become an artist, assuming her dream as a necessity. She went back to school and obtained a BFA from Université Laval (1987) and an MFA from Stanford University (2006) in California. She thought she was a painter, but through studio practice and everyday reality, she naturally moved towards the production of installation and performance works influenced by readymade and her preoccupation with recycling. In short, she tinkers, she patents. She likes to put herself in contexts that shake up her creative habits, by doing artist residencies across various cultures. These stays disrupt her creative reflexes and lead her to constantly renewed challenges. Her works have been widely shown in Canada, the United States, Latin America, several European countries, China and Australia. In 2014, she was awarded the Jean-Paul Riopelle career grant, offered by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She received one of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grants in New York, in 2015. She delivered numerous commissions for art projects and her work is included in several collections. Landry is represented by Vivianeart Gallery (Calgary) and Carl Solway Gallery (Cincinnati, Ohio).
