entre-bleu / bleu de lieu
May 2 – July 5, 2025
Artist
doux soft club
Overview
entre-bleu
As part of the entre-bleu project, the doux soft club invests the interior surfaces of the Vrille mobile with upholstered blankets in shades of blue and pale green. The irregular contours of these covers embrace the various architectural features of the caravan and blend perfectly with its furniture. The installation transforms the Vrille Mobile into a blue, padded space where you can recline and recline on any surface.
This relationship with the body and its comfort, but also with care, is also developed in other ways. Like camping gear, the detachable and removable textile forms can also be deployed outside the Vrille mobile. This feature offers the public and artists alike the chance to explore the different landscapes of the Lower Laurentians.
The corpus of quilted forms is manipulated and organized to create temporary installations from which it is possible, for example, to take shelter or simply sit down. Through these interventions, the project aims to open the public up to poetic, playful and sensitive dialogues with the Lower St. Lawrence region. It’s an invitation to re-experience the landscape through a multisensory and meditative dimension, paying particular attention to the different elements that make it up: sounds, colors, textures, smells, temperatures and light.
bleu de lieu
bleu de lieu is a public engagement project conceived by doux soft club in conjunction with the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE.
bleu de lieu is a participatory installation that invites the public to stay, to rest, to meditate and to interact with the different elements found in our Education Room. For the occasion, the room has been dipped in the characteristic hue of doux soft club’s works. Oscillating between abstract sculptures and furniture elements, the installation’s welcoming shapes are meant to be used and moved around, and are thus constantly reshaped by our visitors’ presence.
This evolutive artwork will be the host of a series of performative gestures carried out by doux soft club during the exhibition. Video traces of these performances will be progressively inserted into the installation, revealing the sculptural objects’ potential for activation. Accompanied by different sound textures, these videos will explore the sensorial and material aspects of the space. bleu de lieu will also be activated by collaborators who will be invited to respond to the work punctually during events, as well as during creative activities offered by our education department.
Credits
Vrille art actuel, Bas Saint-Laurent
August 18-20, 2023
Performative activations:
Camping Rivière-Ouelle,
Camping de la Batture SEBKA
Maison touristique régionale du Bas-Saint-Laurent.
Figuration and climbing expertise: Loïc Breuzin
Climbing advice and consultation: Véronique Prince
© doux soft club, 2023
Exhibition photo credits (bleu de lieu): alignements
Performance photo credits (entre-bleus): Audrey Mainguy
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Artist
doux soft club is an artistic and curatorial collective reuniting the practices of duo Pénélope et Chloë, Mariane Stratis, and Marion Paquette. The four artists met while completing their B.A.s in visual and media arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (2012). It is through numerous exchanges and a mutual desire to see their practices evolve together that doux soft club was founded in 2017. Moved by cohesion, they see the regrouping of their plural visions as an essential part of their process. The club is an adaptable structure that invites all members to collaborate in the sharing, exchange and interinfluence of ideas. doux soft club’s work has been seen in Canada in the context of solo exhibitions at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art (Montreal, 2022), the Darling Foundry (Montréal, 2023), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, 2019), Verticale (Laval, 2021 and 2019), GHAM & DAFE (Montréal, 2018) and in group exhibitions at the Campus de la Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (2021), Musée Ambulant (Québec, 2021), Arprim (Montréal, 2020) and Puce N.5 (Saint-Armand, 2019). The collective was nominated for the Plein Sud Award (Longueuil, 2020) and has received a research, creation and exploration grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2020).
The collective is interested in an aesthetics of softness, which brings forward a rehabilitation of the senses through notions of care, empathy, and resilience. Doux-soft is understood by the artists as the capacity to be amazed by the banal. This capacity is closely tied to the contexts through which the works appear, and allow for a poetics of the everyday to emerge in their works. Their projects investigate, dialogue with, and take on a multiplicity of forms: exterior interventions, websites, artist books, exhibitions, and performances. In this way, their performative work allows them to animate the sculptural objects they create, revealing their sensorial and sensuous characters. These manipulations, documentations and exhibitions seek to transform the viewer’s experience through a series of slippages. By constantly revisiting each project’s potential, the club reflects on the polymorphic, lively and permutable aspects of their production. Through their process, a collective intelligence emerges, feeding their research and production: inter-influence, determine how something is influenced, copy and paste, throw a ball around, catch it, and throw it back.
