In conjunction with the Visiting International Performance Artists class, Myriam Laplante discusses her work.

Myriam Laplante is a Canadian artist living in Italy who started performing while she was a student at Ottawa University in the early seventies. After concentrating on painting, installations and photography and started performing again in 1991, while continuing her "gallery" work. Her early performances were essentially self-portraits. By embodying circus side-show attractions (bearded lady, dancing monkey), a crying ghost or a mutant mermaid, she addresses alienation and the difficulty to communicate, the refusal to adapt to society and the cynicism of the dominant sects. She re-stages the internal tension between desire and memory, power and submission. Her more recent installation and performance works are cynical replies triggered by the absurdities of contemporary society and power-dealing politics on every level. Her work is in the public collections of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Rome) and the Museo di Arte Contemporanea (Rome), the Muse du Qubec (Qubec) and the National Museum of Photography (Ottawa).

Where: Room B208
When: February 24, 2010, 12:15 pm