The Id Was Found Dead in His Flooded Basement
April 18 - 25 2025
3743 St. Catherine St. EST
Montreal QC, H1W 2E9
The most sophisticated formal sculpture ever made was the nuclear family.
You return to the unfinished basement as a site of biographical traumatics and repressive auto-castration. The space is flooding with yellow light and mold. Here, infra-sculptures oscillate between psychopathological note-taking and matrimonial wincest. You move among construction materials that carry both bio-graphical and bio-logical charge: OSB board, pink insulation, laminate, telephone wire ββ residues of real spaces, real floods, the sweat of real labor puddling about.
The father as carpenter, the son beside him, learning the frame before the word ββ absorbing the logic of enclosure long before understanding its terms.
... Bad Friday.
You encounter minimalist sculptural forms as genetic coffins ββ chromosomal reliquaries housing spermatozoic angels, malformed and suspended mid-signal. Their visual ill-logic formed from rubber hose animation ββ anthropomorphia, household object conjuring, elastic limbs, affective breakdowns. The walls around you bristle with an undifferentiated unlife. Silicone sealants knot and sag into whistling ghost-angelics. These are not symbols. These are systems under duress. Janus-faced sculptural systemsβ¦
If minimalism offered you the grid, the sealant, the smooth surface, this is its counter-image. An anti-architecture. A resistance staged not through iconoclasm, but infestation.
A set of white trash voodoo effigies enact another economic blueprint nearby: devotional, financial, punitive. Their forms are bound, zip-tied, slack with elastic tensionβtri-crucified
...Bad Friday. A gesture toward manβs eternal punishment for wanting too much. His rejection of his own salvation. Findom becomes the purest model of inheritance: transactional, domestic, recursive. Power moves quietly here ββ through debt, dependence, repetition. The family re-imagined as a passive-income haunting: an automated cycle of extraction posing as nurture. Their infantile stare sealed in blank dumbness, glossed with sun-stained resins. Their gaze defaults to indifference.
Nothing is asked. Everything is expected.
Surrounding you, a suite of mechanical pencil drawings (Untitled [I thought I was a cartoonist]) flicker between manic mark-making and clinical restraint. You trace out an unlearning ββ an attempt to dismantle the disciplinary straight line, to desophisticate, to re-enter the unstable graphic language of the child. The primordial instinct of the graffito.
Genius is invoked only to be dismantled. Expressionism is no longer style, but destructive tactic. Castration appears not as event, but as enclosure. Institutionalization by accumulation. The father does not punishβyou know this. He builds the home, he erects the cross. The id is not repressedβit is walled in, strung up, insulated, overframed. Killedβand its bones sold flat-packed at IKEA.