Vanessa Brazeau. Training solutions.

How do we think about the body? Is it possible for the body to think and be ready for  competition always and everywhere? 

Developing skills and strategies, muscles and thoughts, movements and responses the works by Vanessa Brazeau are articulated like an experience from the body in competition.

The adaptations of the body at events, at competitions, in life show us how the brain and mind are able to adjust to specific needs and possibilities. We know the inexorable relationship between body and mind, but also how it maintains the survival Cartesian’s notion about the boundaries of both. Then the development of the body and the mind with exercise in several contexts that the Canadian’s artist presents it breaks the separations of them.

"Thesis Body" (documentation for Ideogging)

For this reason, Vanessa Brazeau rethinks the role of competition and amplifies the notion in public space in order to question our vision about the consciousness of the world and the complexity of the relationship with physical and intellectual work. In fact, she tries to not only re-conceptualize the effect of sport on the body with invoked aesthetics, she also explores the possibilities to join together art practice and theory. Both opposing terms as well as sharing the universal experience of everyday challenges, you persevere to achieve something, to control or lose control of your body and mind and accept failure as training or developing yourself she produces new engagement with both a social body and a singular artistic praxis.

"The Solution Mat"

Humour is a main part of her works. With simple gestures focused on sports, physical training or competition she tries to get us to think about how they evoke an emotional relationship between routine experience in public space and the private practice of individuality.

She intends to perform the strategies of how we can fight with our physical and mental expectations. This struggle questions what a body is capable of. It signifies how the body is conformed through mental skills and how the mind is an organ of training in physical conditions.

In this case, Brazeau prepares some accessible and fun, maybe surrealist, events to explore with humour, different thoughts and performative practices.

"Thesis Body" (documentation for Ideogging)

*Text produced in the context of SEA Foundation Residency