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The installation artist Jean-Pierre Gauthier was born in Matane, Québec, in 1965 and lives and works in Montréal. His work thrives on automating and interconnecting a gamut of parts and instruments, applying also sound and motion detectors. Since 1998 Gauthier has increasingly pursued the sound aspect in his work, performing regularly at concerts and in sound-art radio programs. In recent years he has developed sound sculptures in collaboration with the Italian sound artist Mirko Sabatini, with whom he has performed in Québec as well as in Italy. In May 2001, his sound sculpture Commodity and Commotion (a solo piece) premiered at the Angelica International Festival of Music in Bologna, Italy. Gauthier received a Masters degree in Fine Arts at the Université de Québec à Montréal in 1995. He was selected to participate in significant group shows in Montréal, including De fougue et de passion at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal in 1997, as well as the Biennale de Montréal 2000.
Jean-Pierre Gauthier's moving sound installations express an overall lust in creating disorder. He takes everyday objects out of their context, reassembles them and empowers them with their own locomotion. The work then created re-charges the viewer with a sense of playfulness. Most of Gauthier's installations are made of objects that can be readily identified, thus retaining an objective quality that does not trigger emotional or cultural associations. Yet one significant body of Gauthier's work, using household appliances and cleaning products, seems to comment on contemporary society.
The kinetic sculpture Scie/Saw, which Jean-Pierre Gauthier is showing in the exhibition Growth & Risk, emits sounds similar to those of a circular saw. The viewer is challenged to accept the strange sound. As a visual analogy to the sound, the viewer is also confronted with his or her own image reflected in a mirror within the piece. Here Gauthier calls into question our modes of perceiving "near" and "far".
