New York-based artist, Fabienne Lasserre will discuss her art practice and the process of making "Listeners", her solo exhibition that will open at the Athenaeum on Friday, January 26. 

Educated at Concordia University in Montreal (B.F.A., 1996) and Columbia University, New York (M.F.A., 2004), Lasserre lives and works in Brooklyn NY. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the Director of the interdisciplinary MFA in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo projects include Make Room for Space (2018, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY); Les Larmes (2018, Parisian Laundry Gallery, Montreal); and C.Ar.D in città (2015, Palazzo Costa Tretenerro, Piacenza, Italy). Her work was shown in several 2-person exhibits including the The Nervous Hand (2018, 315 Gallery, New York) and Fabienne Lasserre and Annette Wehrhahn (2016, Safe Gallery, New York). Some group exhibits featuring her work include Feed the Meter (2017, Ceysson de Bénétière, Luxembourg); Outside the Lines (2013, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX), Saber Desconocer (2013, Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia), and La Triennale québécoise (2011, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal). In 2017, she was awarded the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship to produce two outdoor sculptures for the grounds of St-Gaudens National Historic Site in New Hampshire. In 2016-17, she received a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program award. In 2013 and 2014, she was the recipient of two Project Grants to Visual Artists from the Canada Council for the Arts to develop a body of sculptures that were shown in solo shows at Parisian Laundry Gallery, Montreal (Les Approches, 2015) and at Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York (Here Like a Story Like a Picture and a Mirror, 2013).

Fabienne Lasserre: Listeners will consist of a series of painting/sculpture hybrids that combine clear vinyl spray-painted in translucent gradients of color with fabric, solidified foam, stucco, and paint. The work recalls modernist abstraction while remaining firmly contemporary in its insistence on the presence of the viewer and her body’s relation to objects in space. Installed as a group, Lassere’s pieces — several of which are suspended from the ceiling— obstruct, frame and direct vision, passage and movement; they inherently imply the presence and engagement of bodies: people who look through, walk around, and peer over. The installation will act as a stage for a series of curated performances. Significantly, the Athenaeum will commission a new work by Beth Gill, an accomplished choreographer who attends to themes of alienation, erasure and power through the lens of abstraction. Thus, the connection between the activity of the body and the inert sculptures, a connection fundamental to Lasserre’s practice, will be emphasized through the movement of the dancers. The exhibition is curated by Athenaeum Director Dr. Katie Geha.