Carolyne Scenna

Through her use of media such as photography, installation, video, sculpture, and printing, Carolyne Scenna bases her practice, among other things, on the capacity of material to retain: what it can be imprinted with, what it is capable of absorbing and what it rejects, what it reveals temporarily or permanently. Some surfaces and objects, reused, bear a sort of material memory that enables her to blur the lines between the end of one project and the beginning of the next, encouraging constant exploration. Scenna’s approach is profoundly process oriented; she sees exhibitions not as a goal but as one of the ways in which material can accumulate traces and be deployed. The residency at Est-Nord-Est provided her with an opportunity to reactivate an object that had been central to a previous exhibition: a huge piece of white canvas that had been laid over a platform on the floor. The piece of canvas, now covering the studio’s entire main wall, offered a perceptual exercise that both testified to past traces of Scenna’s practice and hinted at a range of possibilities. Marked with a myriad of small stains, tiny abrasions and drips, and little sculptural folds caused by the application of glue required for mounting it, the canvas was then covered with other layers of frayed material, in neutral, sometimes imperceptible colours. During the public presentation that marked the end of the residency, the canvas was accompanied by a series of rectangular concrete tiles in an arrangement on the floor. Set in a regular pattern in the studio, they became surfaces for composition exercises with various pigments and materials. Both the canvas and the arrangement of tiles on the floor required sustained attention from visitors, reminiscent of Scenna’s work on the limits of the visible: an invitation to become absorbed in the materials.