Suzanne Joos
ARTIST STATEMENT
Promoting the concept of disorientation as a new mode of tracking, Suzanne Joos’ work takes the idea of the geographical map as a subject of study and exploration. Her exhibitions are presented like rooms of topography where very large drawings are displaced as rollers or ephemeral interventions. Her approach favors the procedural dimension. Cartography is then perceived as an open system that always remains to be redefined and rethought. The artist questions territory and border notions, the relationship between writing and painting. She deforms and disarticulate usual maps, their spatial organization in order to conceive a type of space without fixed points of view that switches to the fictional. And she gradually creates her own lexicon of scriptural and pictorial sign. Through a succession of very small repeated gestures, Suzanne Joos actualizes links between private and public, miniature universes and desire for infinity. If her maps do not allow one to find a direction, they invite one to experience disorientation. As an immigrant child, the Atlases have continuously represented the duality between dream of another world and a questioning about territory notions. After reinventing the idea of elsewhere, elaborating plans of inaccessible cities, Suzanne Joos developed a geography of rubbish by tampering traces left by time on the streets and pavements. With this in mind, she designed digital photomontages by crossing damaged tarmac photographs with fragments of her original woks, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. In addition, she had the concept of the Nomadic Workshop circulated in several places including the event of Art Souterrain, moving piece by piece an in situ work she created on the wall of her former studio. Reflecting on the precariousness of workshops, the recent research of Suzanne Joos focuses on the creation of absurd architectural plans.
Suzanne Joos lives and works in Montreal. She is interested in disorientation by questioning the notion of territory through fictitious maps. Since 2013, she also questions the concept of nomadic workshop as in Ailleurs exhibition curated by Catherine Bolduc and as part of the 2014 edition of Art Souterrain. Her work is regularly shown in solo exhibitions such at the Centre culturel Henri-Lemieux during the 375e of Montreal curated by Nathalie Bachand (2017), at the Centre d’art et d’essai Occurence in Montreal (2015-2016), at the artiste run-centre Voix Visuelle in Ottawa (2014), at Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges in Montreal (2013), at Atelier Zocalo in Longueuil (2012), at Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario in Sudbury (2010), at Maison de la culture Frontenac in Montreal (2009), at the artist-run center Verticale in Laval (2007), at Praxis Art Actuel in Sainte-Thérèse (2006), at Collectif Regart in Lévis (2005) and at the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal (2004). She has also participated in group exhibitions such as the International Contemporary Art Symposium of Baie-Saint-Paul (2015), the exhibition Abris et territoires at Galerie Les Impatients in Montreal curated by Eric Mattson (2016), Le Drapeau des fous an event presented by Folie Culture at Manif d’art 7 in Quebec City and then in Lille (France) and the exhibition Gares, a hypermedia project in collaboration with La Traversée and Sébastien Cliche (2012). Her works are part of public collections including the Collection Prêt d’œuvres d’art du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and La Collection de la Ville de Montréal. A recipient of several grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts, she holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in visual and media arts from Université du Québec à Montréal as well as a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art history from Université de Montréal. Since 2004, she has been a member of La Travesée | Atelier de géopoétique.
COLLECTIONS
Collection Prêt d’œuvre d’art du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
City of Montreal Municipal art collection (PADORAC)
Laval art collection