‘This is my very own private cup. Ma tasse privée. I am the only one who’s ever drunk from it. Even you would never have used it. You had bought the cup in Sienna, Italy. You travelled a lot, everywhere. Whenever we were apart, even as children... We would meet at night through telepathy. At exactly ten o’clock, I would think very hard of you, and you would think very hard of me.’1
Maryse Lariviere’s practice shifts between dreamed realities, psychoanalytic examinations, reposts to published work, reiterations and collaborations, and inhabits performance, video, sculpture, painting and other mediums. While attempting to identify and examine manifestations of the “feminine” and the “romantic” within the genre of Autofiction, Larivière's practice is determined to invest its conceptual operations with an emotional investment.
In her practice, Autofiction serve as a riposte to engage in a critical discourse about intimacy, identity and alterity. Appropriation strategies are used to create her own mythology from a variety of sources and different eras, all borrowed, diverted, rehabilitated and artistically replayed, in an attempt to questions what in our Western society, is the role and place of emotions, but also of artistic creation, and of alternatives and marginalized cultures.
Lariviere has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. In 2006, she was awarded the prestigious residency at Villa Arson and Cité des Arts de Paris. Her most recent solo exhibition The Hollow was presented at Clint Roenisch gallery in Toronto, Canada.
Co-founder of Pavilion Projects, she initiated the Montreal Off-Biennale & the MTL ART MAP. She collaborated on the curation of the exhibition The Wrong Corpse at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in Art & Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario, Larivière earned her MFA degree from the prestigious Studio Arts program at the University of Guelph.
(Adapted from Katie Bethune's text from the Chalk & Butter catalogue for the exhibition at Diaz Contemporary.) 1 Boys Meets Girls. Dir. Leos Carax. Perf. Denis Lavant, Mireille Perrier and Carroll Brooks. Artificial Eye, 1984. DVD.