Personae - Pierre Dalpé Monograph

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Monograph Launch:

Saturday September 22, 3-6 PM

Monograph

Author(s):

Introduction by: Michael Toppings

Essays by: Penny Cousineau-Levine, Dayna McLeod, and Karl-Gilbert Murray

Titles of texts:

Penny Cousineau-Levine
Private Negotiations, Public Personae: The Photography of Pierre Dalpé

Dayna McLeod
The Hierarchy of Photographic Truth and Dalpé’s Digital Double

Karl-Gilbert Murray
Personae: Queer Portraits and Transgendered Stagings

Designer:
Associés libres, Montréal
(Rodolfo Borello and Jennifer de Freitas)

Publisher:
Robert Hébert
Les Éditions Cayenne

Acknowledgements:

Pierre Dalpé wishes to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its financial support of this monograph.

Price:

Cdn / US: $45

*Note: regular price of monograph is $45, but it will be sold for $40 the day of the book launch.

Where it might be purchased:

For the moment, it will be available for purchase through the publisher’s website:
Contact person / publisher: Robert Hébert
www.editionscayenne.com

*Note: the book will eventually be available in libraries and specialized bookstores (hopefully as of beginning of October).

Bios

Pierre Dalpé
Pierre Dalpé was born in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, and moved to Montréal at the age of 7, where he has since lived and worked. In 1993, he received a B.F.A. in film studies and photography from Concordia University. Over the past two decades Dalpé has produced several bodies of work including Clothes Minded (1990–1996), Backstage (1992–ongoing), Wigstock (1992–1995), Personae (1997–ongoing) and Teatro Mexico (2010). His work is a fusion of analog and digital photography, and explores the interconnected relationships between the body, identity, disguise and performance. Navigating between documentary reportage and staged mise en scène, Dalpé questions preconceived notions about photographic portraiture and narrative representations.

Dalpé’s work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Russia, Mexico and the United Kingdom. His photographs are part of private collections, and have been published in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and periodicals. He is the recipient of numerous grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. He has participated in artist-in-residence programs at The Banff Centre; The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec’s studio residency in Mexico City.

Penny Cousineau-Levine

Penny Cousineau-Levine is an art writer and theoretician with a particular interest in photography and performance art. Her 2003 book Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination was the first in-depth examination of Canadian photography and identity. Her writing has also appeared in Afterimage, Canadian Art, Parachute and other art journals, and in numerous exhibition catalogues. She is currently working on a book on the strategy of masquerade in contemporary art.

Penny Cousineau-Levine has taught at Montreal's Concordia University and the University of Ottawa, where she served as director of the Department of Visual Arts from 2003 to 2010.

Dayna McLeod
Dayna McLeod is a freelance writer who has written extensively on art and art practices. She is also a video and performance artist whose work has shown internationally. She created, and continues to manage, 52 Pick-Up (www.52pickupvideos.com), a video website where participants make one video a week for an entire year (established 2009). Dayna is currently at The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University pursuing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in humanities.

Karl-Gilbert Murray
With a bachelor’s degree in art history and a master’s in art studies from the Université du Québec à Montréal, Karl-Gilbert Murray has held several positions related to the art milieu, including that of curator for the Musée Régional d’Argenteuil and assistant director and assistant editor, by turns, for the contemporary art magazine ETC. Specialized in contemporary art, his many investigations revolving around questions of identity—culture studies, gender studies, gay studies, feminist art theory—have allowed him to develop a multidisciplinary approach with a particular slant on works of art. He has also contributed critical articles to various art magazines: ETC, esse arts + opinions, Espace sculpture, Spirale, Vie des arts, Archée and Pref Mag (France). As a curator, he has produced several exhibition booklets and catalogues and conceived a number of exhibitions, among them Le corps gay/The Gay Body (Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, 2002); Attila Richard Lukacs : De l’obscurité/Inside Darkness (MAC des Laurentides, 2008); Evergon : Jeux de la passion/Passion Plays (Galerie Verticale, 2009); Ed Pien : Déliaison/Unbinding (MAC des Laurentides, 2011); Jim Verburg : Séquence/Still, as part of the International Festival of Films on Art, or FIFA (Cinémathèque québécoise, 2012), and Sentier Art3, édition 2012 : Joachim Jacob, Ed Pien et Frédéric Saia (Parc du Bois de Belle-Rivière, Mirabel, 2012).

Michael Toppings
Michael Toppings is a text-based, language artist born and raised in Québec though he has lived nearly half of his life elsewhere. Since 1988, he has created a body of work that attempts to amend the reading experience—to coerce the reader into the role of viewer, listener and active participant. His art practice is also, therefore, about blurring a line between publishing and exhibiting. His works are mash-ups of the varnished and of the unvarnished; of popular cultural references and of social realism, oscillating between the sublime and the pedestrian; between the factual and the fictional.

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