The Art Gallery of Grande Prairie recognizes the national importance of Machines at Play, a kinetic sound installation by Montréal based artist, inventor, musician Jean-Pierre Gauthier.
A virtuoso of everyday reality, an artisan of contemporary art, an entomologist of sound, Gauthier sees, and hears, all the acoustic and metaphorical potential of the found object. Pipe fittings, funnels and electrical wires are transformed, in the artist’s hands, into an astonishing investigation of order and chaos, permanence and fragility, usefulness and gratuitousness. In his hybrid practice Jean-Pierre Gauthier incorporates visual arts and audio exploration. His kinetic installations combine humour and poetry in a highly rigorous artistic approach.
Jean-Pierre Gauthier’s Marqueurs d’incertitude (Uncertainty Markers) are part of the artist’s ongoing series of kinetic drawing machines. The title alludes to the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, a theorem that asserts the impossibility of predicting the behaviour of the universe. The movement of each work is activated by visitors circulating around it.
The graphite attached to the wires produces drawings that evolve gradually throughout the duration of the exhibition, more visitor traffic generates increasingly dense markings. Not only do the rods and tubes assume lifelike shapes (a spider, a cockroach, a skater), but the drawings themselves are real-time records of each machine’s interaction with the wall, further illustrating the temporal dimension that is at the heart of Gauthier’s practice.
Consider this: Using HB pencils, these drawings change daily. The drawing becomes more opaque, dense, thick and has more body with time. There is a notion of an event in which Gauthier’s work integrates the process of transformation, of evolution.
What purpose has the dog leash in the Uncertainty Markers?
The dog leash and the various rods installed here and they act as weights or counterweights or obstacles that make an exploration of different paths of the drawing machines through space possible, and thus different tracings.
