Eric Lesage

In The Fall into Time (Quadrangle Books, 1970), E M Cioran writes, “Time is so constituted that it does not resist the mind’s insistence on fathoming it. Its density disappears, its warp frays, and all that is left are a few shreds with which the analyst must be satisfied. This is because time is not made to be known, but lived.” Walking into self-taught artist Eric Lesage’s exhibition at RAW Gallery entitled “Re: Definition” is like falling into, and simultaneously out of, time. Here, Lesage explores influences on the artist and on the making of art.

Lesage’s ongoing project of meticulous weaving demands extraordinary patience and focus; working sometimes three hours a day it took him over six years to complete this current installation. Painstakingly, he laced monochromatic, sepia-tinged ribbons of paper into large-scale panels that hang from threads seemingly subject to an imaginary chain of being. These panels are plaited from a gift his archivist brother gave him—a 1956 Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary. Lesage places tremendous importance on the found object, which he directly connects to his own preoccupation with transformation; a trope at the heart of his work. Using found objects, he marries the art of impermanence with the ideology of preservation and new purpose. For him, artifacts are, by their very nature, temporary. If something is no longer of use, we can, and must find a way to repurpose and breathe new life into it. “Re: Definition” is thus a project that explores time, but it is also a corporeal dance and meditation on how to approach living and labouring.

Lesage, the youngest of 20 children, credits his “maman” for the wisdom to know the value in all things. This astonishing project of exquisite beauty is an homage to the matriarch. “She taught me to weave,” he says. “It began as a child at my mother’s side—homemade bread, worn jeans into blankets, darned socks. Or,” he says, “maybe it was later learning my father’s business as a second-hand furniture and appliance dealer: auctions, strangers’ homes, scrapyards, a life amidst found objects, seeing that rusted metal twisted and torn, that box of old slides left behind.” Certainly, his project emerges out of the talent he inherited for salvaging.

By removing sheets of paper from the Webster’s to cut and knit his panels, Lesage reinvents space and phrasing, removing them from their original contexts. He retrieves the edges and shards and carefully preserves them in a box from which he will later compose new weaves; nothing is ever cast aside. By reinventing the spaces these words and pages once occupied, he manipulates the lexicon. The ideas of occupation and industry themselves are teased out and rearticulated. The Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, once based on alphabetization, is now redefined and made anew. His weaving deliberately demystifies a once readily and sensibly understood order of things, allowing the viewer to compose and assemble his or her own expressions, ones that bring new conceptualization to standard English and encyclopedic knowledge.

He further challenges us to question physical labour and repetition, each repetition being the same, but different. Here, the experience of time, as he aestheticizes it, becomes a transformative one, and we seek out the spaces in between the weaves to mark our way through the textual labyrinth.

The RAW Gallery space has become an imaginary space of light and paper. Making our way down the stairs of the gallery to the darkened room, we have descended into a catacomb-like space where mysterious papyrus scripts whisper resistant secrets. Lesage’s weaves direct us to move around and through them, but to slow our pace.

This work, which is as much about labour and occupation, change and impermanence, is also about expression and the limits of language, explanation and representation. His artistry lies in the rhythm and cadence that our own movements create among the panels. Ironically, the closer we move into the weaves to scrutinize them the more distant any decipherable meaning becomes. This process of slowing down, Lesage claims, is essential to understanding his project. He wants us to mark time.

“Re: Definition” then is not only about time but also about changing times and human history, experience and reception. For Lesage the work’s reception becomes remarkable in myriad ways, but most delightfully the work comes alive when others engage it. Two moments during the exhibition stand out for him. One was when a group of Korean ESL students visited the site; their reaction to the work as a marvel and fascination struck him. It was clear the language barrier no longer mattered. The students sat and meditated at a distance from the panels or walked through the installation, struck by their experience of them as works of beauty. The other occasion he enjoyed was a theatre company’s request to use the space as a backdrop for their play. The spectator response was intriguing when members of the small audience apprehended the panels from a distance, not knowing what they were looking at. Only after the play concluded were they able to move closer and understand what they were.

For Lesage, his work is always “becoming finite,” though it could never really be considered or read as done; there are and will always be multiple possibilities and readings of “Re: Definition.” Reception in different contexts and spaces, and by diverse audiences over time will always disallow “Re: Definition” any hope for finitude or a fixed and temporal life. ❚

“Re: Definition” was exhibited at RAW Gallery, Winnipeg, from January 13 to February 19, 2012.

Kim Olynyk is a writer and an instructor at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba.