YOU, ME & YOU is an installation centred on a long-form video broken into two- or three-hour long segments, each playing once through the exhibition — see a moment or miss it forever. Annie Gauthier and Milutin Gubash are a couple. Working in collaboration, they are interested in narrative, performance and interactions taking place in the creative process. For this piece, the artists take their own life story as a starting point, revealing and analyzing experiences as they go — alone, with each other, with other people in the art milieu. In sequences representing, condensing or reconstituting single days or nights, they putz around, go to shows, lie in bed, talk, fight, fuck, sleep, dream and remember/recount their common story.
Annie and Milutin insist on being seen when they are dumb as well as serious, sentimental as well as bitter, when they are funny as well as when they are assholes, showing themselves as we all are, vulnerable. As stated by the title of the work, you as viewer are dragged into their relationship. You can’t hide behind cynicism or irony when confronted with this bold embrace. The artists don’t allow you the distance necessary to do so.
From YOU, ME & YOU arises an occasion for you to consider your own life and relationships, your desires, your need to connect/communicate with others, to tell your own gossip if only to yourself, to remind yourself how you ended up where you are in that moment. And so the narrative in the video is added to, subtracted from, objected to…
Annie Gauthier is an artist member of the performance collective Women With Kitchen Appliances. With this collective, she has conceived and presented numerous performance in Canada and the United States. Her last actions comprise a performance as part as Setting the Table: Bargaining Women's Equality Conference of the The Canadian Union of Public Employees and an installation, a performance and a kitchen certification as part as the Québec Triennial, Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme. She holds a bachelor degree in Visual Arts (UQAM) and a DESS in Cultural Organisation Management (HEC, Montréal)
wwkacertification.blogspot.com
Milutin Gubash
Born in Novi Sad (Serbia) and living in Québec since 2005, Milutin Gubash has mounted exhibitions in Québec, Canada, the United States and Europe, including shows at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (“LOTS”, 2007), Optica (“Born Rich, Getting Poorer”, 2009), Galerie 3015 in Paris and RLBQ in Marseille (“Which Way to the Bastille?”, 2008). His practice encompasses photography, video, and performance, and regularly features the participation of his family and friends, who portray versions of themselves in Gubash’s Do-It-Yourself sitcoms, soap operas, family photos, and improv theatre pieces. Using simple means and often comical gestures, conventional domestic, social and professional roles are mixed up and up-ended as we are invited to follow the artist in reconsidering our own identities and environments.
www.milutingubash.com