Considered a pioneer of transactional practices in Quebec, the overlapping threads of Victoria Stanton’s praxis – as an artist, researcher, curator, and educator – place writing and dialogue at the centre of her performative works. Her first book Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral History of Spoken Word in Montreal (conundrum press, 2001), co-authored with Vincent Tinguely, chronicles a vibrant artistic movement via interviews with over 75 artists. Her second book, The 7th Sense/Le 7e sens : Practicing Dialogues / Practicing Workshops / Practicing the Daily Performative / Practicing Performance Art, co-authored with the TouVA collective (Sylvie Tourangeau, Anne Bérubé and Stanton), draws upon a profound exploration of “the performative” in performance art (SAGAMIE édition d’art, 2017). Stanton has presented performances, infiltrating/relational actions, exhibitions, and films/videos in Quebec, Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan, Mexico, and Cuba, and in 2018 was a recipient of the Prix Powerhouse, a biennial recognition award that celebrates women-identified artists who have reached the mid-stage in their career and contribute in a significant and sustained way to the cultural life of Montréal. In 2020 Stanton began a research-creation PhD in Art Education at Concordia University, exploring “Doing Nothing” as a creative vehicle in artistic process through examining the role of rest, pause, slowness, and the interval in both performance art/artworld contexts & everyday spaces like the (art) classroom, and in 2022 was awarded a Canada Graduate Scholarship through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to support her research.
7 Minutes in Heaven (2017), Kåren Centre, Festival Club HULLABALOO, as part of the New Performance Turku Festival, Finland (photo by Jussi Virkkumaa)
With a history in stage-based (spoken word/music) performance, her current preoccupation with relational aesthetics (social practice and the gift economy), human geography (the performance of place), expanded architecture (how bodies and the built environment intersect), and expanded performative analysis (the agency that we, further, bring to the performance of self/collective in everyday life), have become the lenses through which her work is carried out. Asking such questions as: What consciousness do we bring to the places that we occupy? How do places inhabit us? How do we interact with the surrounding environment – and further still, with others who we may encounter there? Occurring both within and without the art-frame, the goal is to responsively activate site by introducing a performative element via a relational exchange – collaboratively working toward expanding an interval in time while collapsing an already diminishing space between the audience/artist and life/art.
// Solo exhibitions include: Cultural Institute of Mexico in Montreal (Montreal, QC), The City of Saint John Art Gallery (Saint John, NB), 3e impérial (Granby, QC), PAVED Arts (Saskatoon, SK), Tenderpixel Gallery (London, UK), and Galerie Corrid’Art Sylviane Poirier (Montreal, QC). // Performance and infiltrating actions include: Nuit Blanche (Calgary, AB), LIVE: Biennial of Performance Art (Vancouver, BC), The Works Art & Design Festival and Visualeyez (Edmonton, AB), Art Toronto, Toronto Free Gallery, Performance Studies International #16 – Performing Publics, and 7a*11d Festival (Toronto, ON), Open Source Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), InterAzione (Sardinia, IT), Vollevox (Brussels, BE), Festival Infr’Action (Sète, FR), Le Préavis de désordre Urbain (Marseille, FR), Overload Festival (Melbourne, AU), the Leeds Met Gallery (Leeds, UK), Performer Stammtisch (Berlin, DE), Body Landscapes Festival (Copenhagen, DK), Live Art for Kids Festival (Odense, DK), New Performance Turku Festival (Turku, FI), Gallery Para Globe (Tokyo, JP), Montréal~Habana: Rencontres en art actuel (Havana, CU), VIVA! Art Action, HTMlles Festival, OFFTA Festival, Art Qui Fait Boum! Triennial of Emerging Artists, Festival Voix d’Amériques, Festival International Montréal en Arts, Edgy Women Festival, and a captivating appearance on the nationally broadcast television show Des Kiwis et des hommes (Montreal, QC). // Video screenings include: Vidéos de femmes dans le parc (2009, 2011 and 2015), Les Rendez-Vous du cinema québecois (2009, 2014 and 2015), Le Festival international du film sur l’Art (2010 and 2012), and Laissez-Passer – curated selection of video works in relation to Stanton’s practice at Groupe Intervention Vidéo, (Montreal, QC), Festival Images Contre Nature, (Marseille, FR) Traverse Vidéo festival (Toulouse, FR), Museum of Modern Art, (Buenos Aires, AR), Museum La Tertulia (Cali, CO), Video Pool Media Arts Centre, (Winnipeg, MB), the Chicago Anarchist Film Festival (Chicago, IL), the 3rd Annual Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Visible Verse 2008 (Vancouver, BC), the Bild-rausch video festival (Saarbrücken, DE), Video and New Media Festival (Lisbon, PT), the internationally touring Upgrade! P2P Outdoor Art Videos and the nationally touring J’ACTE, a program of performance-video curated by Eugénie Cliche (2012). // Residencies include: Verticale – centre d’artiste (Laval, QC), McGill University, P. Lantz Artist-in-Residence (Montreal, QC), DARE-DARE (Montreal, QC), ORANGE, Centre Expression (Saint-Hyacinthe, QC), Salem Art Works (Salem, NY), Praxis art actuel (Ste-Thérèse. QC), Third Space Gallery (Saint John, NB), FRONDA (Real del Monte, MX), 3e impérial (Granby, QC), Centre DAÏMÕN (Gatineau, QC), Centre Vaste et Vague (Carleton-sur-Mer, QC), Centre Sagamie (Alma, QC), and Artexte (Montreal, QC).
Key words:
Performative Consciousness/Performative Encounters
Relational Aesthetics/Infiltrating Practices/Everyday Actions
Non-Action/Micro-Event
Interval/In-Between/Interstice/Liminal Space
Place/Non-Place/Third Place/Space Ballets
Walking/Déambulation/Flânerie
Doing Nothing/Non-Doing/Slacking/Deep Hangouts
Art-Life/Life-Art/Un-Artist
For booking, images or research purposes please contact Victoria Stanton.
Bank of Victoria 