Artists Carl Bouchard and Martin Dufrasne have created a joint body of work which offers a unique variation on the familiar theme of the artist-couple by playing on the very motive of ‘couplings’: in over 30 collaborations to date, they have appeared as brothers, lovers, twins, duellists, enemies, Siamese twins … The resulting pieces are mocking, insolent but tender works which challenge preconceived ideas of identity and otherness. Bouchard and Dufrasne refer to them as ‘self-portraits’, which draw on their shared sense of friendship, affinity and complicity. Yet it is not merely the relationship between the two artists that is thus examined: with the help of different media – installation, sculpture, photography, action, and performance – they also aim to activate the particular forces that exist between the work and its audience, thereby reflecting on the nature of participation and communality. The spectators find themselves assigned variously the roles of voyeur, accomplice, judge or witness, always implicated in the study and critique of human behaviour and relational dynamics that these performances engender.
Carl Bouchard and Martin Dufrasne live and work together in Chicoutimi. In addition to their collaborative practice, which is increasingly celebrated as they exhibit their work nationally and internationally, both artists have received public recognition for their individual artistic output, which has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Québec, Ontario, Columbia and France. Bouchard and Dufrasne also participate actively in a number of artist-initiated projects in their hometown, including ‘TouTTout’, a complex of twelve artists’ studios, and ‘LE LOBE’, a centre dedicated to residency programmes for visual artists.

At ‘RHWNT’, Bouchard and Dufrasne will contribute another piece to their ongoing investigation of duality: their performance, subtitled ‘a confrontation between two obstinates’, will take as its starting point a fable by Jean de La Fontaine about two goats which, crossing a bridge in a quest for freedom, stubbornly refuse to make way for each other and both end up in the water. Bouchard and Dufrasne will explore the underlying theme of unyieldingness versus collaboration with the help of ‘motivations, traps and jewellery’.