Lyne Lapointe
"Lyne Lapointe" by Rhiannon Vogl, Summer 2008, pp. 102
Lyne Lapointe’s exhibition“La Perle” transformed the upper mezzanine of the Carleton University Art Gallery into a refined version of a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities. For the show, Lapointe made selections from her personal collection of images culled from the pages of antique encyclopedias and art-historical sources, medical journals and botanical texts, then adorned them with a multitude of glass beads, wax and found objects. Hung in rustic wooden frames and from metal armatures, the 23 individual works that make up “La Perle” reflect the artist’s continued investigation of the modalities of sound and vision, optical play and history.
Simulacres (2005–06) is a series of 18 small black-and-white prints of flora and fauna, mechanical toys, musical instruments and sewing implements— they would seem to have been found in an attic among dog-eared family photographs and historical memorabilia. Lapointe has meticulously pinned hundreds of tiny opalescent beads overtop of these images, creating geometric patterns that simultaneously interrupt our ability to see the original image below and add a sumptuous, light-reflective quality to each work. She hung this series using rotatable metal brackets, tilting the works alternately inward towards and then outward away from the wall. This technique further distorted the viewing experience. The architectural framing method flirted with our desire to view the works straight-on, and in this playfulness extended the artist’s interest in museology and methods of display.
Several larger works were more illustrational, filling out the image rather than obscuring it. In Rotating Star (2005), nebulous swirls of silvery beads spiral around the components of a disassembled gramophone—a brass horn, a crank and a small concave mirror. In the triptych Anatomical Venus (2006), beads outline and spill out around four diagrams of a wooden model of the female body made for the study of anatomy in the 17th century. The abdomen of one figure has been impregnated by an antique music box and a glass bird. The works invoke a sense of animation and interactivity and hint at a yet-to-be-exhibited body of work that will see Lapointe’s paintings transformed into instruments that perform an automated concert. Coupled with Lapointe’s intricate beadwork, their kinetic energies create a world of whimsy and allegory, with space, as ever, left open for our own musings and memories.
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