Born in Trois-Rivières, multidisciplinary artist Diane Landry lives and works in Quebec City. For more than two decades she has been creating environments and installations that plunge the viewer into a spellbinding experience of sights, sounds and emotions. Her kinetic installations are based on a highly skilful manipulation of everyday objects, commonplace things like keys, record players, coffee-makers, skates, umbrellas, laundry baskets, saucepans, salad spinners, clocks, bedsteads and even washing machines. These basic objects, when modified, seem to evoke a forgotten world of the imagination in which dreams and poetry mingle and are endlessly reinvented through the personal experience, the eyes and hearing, of each individual viewer.

This solo exhibition features a variety of pieces selected from the artist’s best-known works, most notably École d’aviation (Flight School, 2000), Le bouclier perdu (The Lost Shield, 2005), and more recent productions such as Une silence radio (Radio Silence, 2008). The show also includes a compilation of videos of solo performances by the artist chosen from a body of work stretching back twenty years.…With the title of this exhibition, The Defibrillators, we also evoke machinery. The device which delivers an electrical discharge to the heart – that unique, indispensible and resonant organ – seems to us to sum up both the artist’s intentions and the diversity of her projects. The term is intended to underline Landry’s manipulation of electrical circuits and engines that combine movement and sound – a manipulation that delivers the surge, the shock, by which humdrum objects are brought back to life and transformed into moving sculptures.

Excerpted from Gaëtane Verna, “The Mechanics of the Everyday”, in Diane Landry. Les defibrillateurs/The Defibrillators

Diane Landry

Born in 1958 in Trois-Rivières, Diane Landry now lives and works in Quebec City. She holds a BFA from Université Laval and in 2006 completed a master’s degree in art at Stanford University in California. In the past two decades her work has been exhibited widely across Canada and in major cities in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, China and Europe. She is represented by the SolwayJones Gallery in Los Angeles, and her works can be seen in notable collections, including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Quebéc. Throughout her career her oeuvre has garnered important prizes, including, in 2007, the very first Giverny Capital Award, presented for excellence in contemporary art in Quebéc, the 2006 – 2007 Videre Reconnaissance Prize, presented by Manifestation internationale d’art de Quebéc, and a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships Award from the San Francisco Foundation in 2005.

Diane Landry, 12 Umbrellas (1989) detail