Essentially, Josée Dubeau views her work with sculptures, installations and drawings as a laboratory for investigation into human living conditions. With her installation in Studio 2 of the Künstlerhaus, the artist has created a space that one could describe as the topography of office architecture: desks, some shelves and filing cabinets appear to be waiting for the appropriate civil servants. Finally, at the centre of the room there is a waiting area with seating for potential clients. But Josée Dubeau’s “Office” is not usable as such. Assembled from delicate strips of wood, the objects merely draw the outline of each individual piece of office furniture, meaning that the overall arrangement loses its three-dimensionality; in the viewer’s perception, it takes on the character of a drawing in space. In this way, the installation becomes a model of the structures supporting bureaucracy.

Exhibition Statement

“Born in Montreal and based in the Ottawa region, Josée Dubeau is the first grant recipient from The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Ministère des relations internationales du Québec to participate in the International Studio Program at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

With her installation ESPACEMENT, Josée Dubeau has developed a series of sculptures based on the notion of “negative space” which can be looked at as a space absent of mass and gravity, a space more or less invisible. Josée Dubeau has designed a generic public space which one could identify as a topography of office architecture, a model working environment derived from the modular uniformity of conventional furniture. Desks appear to await employees, as do the shelving units and filing cabinets, a conference table, and in the middle of the exhibition studio, a waiting area with seating possibilities.

Made of fine sticks of pine wood, Josée Dubeau has created an artificial social structure which corresponds with the outline of the surfaces and volumes of furniture. The demat-erialization here obtained becomes an instrument for transparency. ESPACEMENT is able to loose its three-dimensionality and take on the visual sensation of the observer as a drawing in space. Therefore, Dubeau’s reduction of her sculptures down to contour lines becomes much more, with much less material, than simply a model of organisation : it reveals the underlying structures that support bureaucracy.

Implosive systems and short-circuited objects with signs of inadequate or excessive performances characterize Josée Dubeau’s works. She seeks within spatial social patterns the increasing distance between space and feeling.”