Drawing on materials collected from the artist's environment, this show of three-dimensional work presents dissections of everyday objects. These reveal an alternative anatomy of both material and expectation, evoking narratives of culture and mortality often overlooked in everyday things.
Maskull Lasserre was born in Alberta in 1978, he lives and works in Montreal. He has a BFA from Mount Allison University (Visual Art and Philosophy), and an MFA from Concordia University (Sculpture). Lasserre's sculptures and drawings explore the unexpected potential of the everyday through allegories of value, expectation, and utility. Elements of nostalgia, accident, humour, and the macabre are incorporated into works that induce strangeness in the familiar, and provoke uncertainty in the expected. Lasserre has exhibited across Canada and in the United States, most recently at the Museum of Art and Design, New York. He will participate in a group exhibition at the DePaul Museum in Chicago in January 2013. The artist's work is in the collections of the Government of Canada (Transport Canada, DND), Canada Council for the Arts, and the City of Ottawa, amongst others.
In the words of the artist:
"Fable was conceived as a collection of works unified by the common approach of material subtraction. The “image”, or representation revealed by this act was intended to both unify and activate the familiar objects into which they was carved. These carved subjects, exist as spectres – present as illusions of the missing matter, symptoms of an object that is - at once - less than what it used to be, and more. These are material metaphors, and the story that links the objects in syntactic verse; the fable.
By nature, carving is both an honest and a humble act. It has no secrets, no magic, and leaves no room for deceit. A carving always abides within the natural potential of its host, and can only exist by the material's consent. The subtractive process has so much potential precisely because of its modest origins. When applied incisively, the technique manifests matter itself with a kind of thought. Carving's strange alchemy turns the wood of its host into fictional substances of bone, rope, and carapace.
Behind the act is the intent. My approach is philosophical where each intervention is a line of interrogation into the nature of matter, its history, purpose, and potential. The image is a question that I ask of the object; the act of carving itself is a dissection aimed to discover the exact pathology of intent. Each of these works is a negotiation between matter and mind. Each the remnant of a conversation; a material dialectic between the maker and the made. They exist as evidence of a shared authorship between object and intent, effort and accident.
The choice of wooden objects of a certain vintage might suggest a kind of nostalgia or yearning for antiquity. The physical solidity of older objects is what suits them so well to being carved. Their history has not stopped in time, and participate in the everyday present just like any more recently manufactured good. The only distinction is that the extended histories of older objects earn them a kind of trustworthiness that is both exploited and subverted in the carved motifs that they concede. The history of these well worn things holds the potential for surprising outcomes. The jeopardy, animation, delicacy and decay, that has slept in the wood through all its prior use and purpose is revealed through my work. My hope is not to illustrate the details of incidental carved motifs, but to reveal the mystery, and the potential for risk and wonder that waits in the untouched wood. " - Maskull Lasserre