STUDIO VISIT – Fabienne Lasserre

Fabienne Lasserre is a New York City based artist and co-director of the Studio Art low residency MFA program at MICA in Baltimore. In 2019 Lasserre received a Guggenheim Fellowship award and has since exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the country. Recently, she finished and installed a large permanent sculpture in Montreal and is now in the process of building a new home studio. We spoke about ways to keep creativity alive while her primary studio practice is on pause and how she deals with practical and conceptual aspects of her work. Driven by mythology, science fiction, surface, and the human form, Fabienne Lasserre makes sculptures that speak the language of abstract painting, dance, and activating space.

Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Fabienne Laserre in Brooklyn, New York, September 2024

Amy: I know that you are in between studios and in the process of building a new home studio – how has that process been for you? What are you doing to cope creatively?

Fabienne: I had to pack up my studio last-minute, and put it all in storage. I  hope it’s not for a long time, maybe a couple months. Meanwhile, I thought that I would do ceramics, since I do that in a different space. I’m also making a print in a friend’s print shop. And I’m working on a book – that’s actually super fun. I love working with the writers and the designers, editing texts and figuring out the layout. It’s a book on my work, in between a traditional catalog and an artist book. Let’s say that it’s a poetic take on the idea of the catalog. 

A: Your work straddles painting and sculpture – is there a way of working or category that feels most true for you?

F: If I don’t know the person I’m talking to, and they don’t know my work, I tend to describe it as sculpture. I’ll say: I’m a sculptor. But that’s just because it’s the most practical term. If I elaborate then I’ll say I’m a painter. I studied painting, I taught painting for decades, I look at painting more than anything else. Does three-dimensional work get to count as painting? I say yes. I like to think of my work as imagining different ways to paint, as expanding what counts as painting. But I’m not trying to establish any kind of fixed definitions: I like fuzzy lines…

A: What are some things that inform your current work or practice that might be surprising to hear? 

F: I’m inventing bodies. Bodies that straddle the various definitions we typically use to contain them: alive/inert, human/non-human, male/female, and more. My work used to be more directly figurative, but even now that it has become more abstract, I am very consciously trying to imagine bodies that aren’t stuck in traditional categories. From a feminist perspective, I’m interested in conceiving bodies in a way that is less hierarchical, for example where the mind isn’t superior to the flesh, or emotions aren’t lesser than rational ideas, or vision doesn’t dominate touch.

For decades I’ve been inspired by science fiction and the possibilities of sci-fi to create creatures, monsters, and worlds by mixing categories. And also mythology. I’m totally into myth and sci-fi, even though it’s not directly explicit in my work. 

Recently, I also started to think of my pieces as receivers. I am creating works that can receive the viewers’ desires, projections, ideas, interpretations.  That’s why I called my last show Listeners: rather than claiming anything, the pieces receive or absorb whatever the viewers bring. This goes back to the idea of re-thinking the hierarchies that circumscribe our bodies: among our senses, our ability to hear, to listen, is undervalued.  

A: How do you deal with scale in your work? I feel like you are widely known for large scale pieces 

F: The size of many of my pieces pretty much corresponds to the size of my body. For the most part, I make pieces that I can carry myself. They’re rarely larger than my arm span. Even though they are relatively big, they’re super light and I can pick them up easily or drag them on the floor to move them around. I think that’s a big part of how the size of my pieces is determined for me, and I intuitively landed there. I also make small pieces, wall pieces that are head-size or torso-size.  I haven’t really shown these smaller pieces much. I started making them because I wanted to trade with my friends or give them to people. Most people I know don’t have room for an obnoxiously big sculpture in their living room!

A:  How do you handle and operate color versus texture versus translucency? Those formal elements?

F: I mean, to me, color, translucency and texture are never separate. That’s one of the many things that is fascinating about color: it cannot be separated from its materiality. A green that is glossy is not the same green as a matte one; a green leather jacket is completely different from green astroturf or from pine needles, even if their hues are very close. Color is always embedded in material and dependent on light. Color is so contingent on everything, yet we explain it in terms of fixed categories, like “red”. As if “red” had a delimited area, a kind of hue-territory. It really doesn’t make sense.

As far as the process of making my pieces goes, I typically make a pencil sketch of the shape and weld and assemble it. At this stage I am measuring my materials and planning ahead (even if the plan often takes a different turn). The color and the texture, which are again not separate, happen intuitively afterwards. To achieve color, I use fabric, paint, felt, found materials… But this stage, let’s call it the color-stage, happens without any sketches, in an improvisational and very slow, manner.  

A: Can you talk a little bit about the Public art project you did last year:

F: My piece is called Bruits-couleur, which roughly translates as Noise-color. The National Bank of Canada commissioned it for their new headquarters in Montreal. The building just got inaugurated. It’s  gigantic: 40 floors I think. The lobby is open to the public, with a cafe, a daycare, places to sit, and parks around it. It’s open to everyone, free, 24 hours a day, even on Sundays. The bank commissioned six artists, all women, to make monumental sculptures for specific sites in the atrium.  My piece is by far the largest I’ve made to date, approximately 13.5 feet high. It’s made of Aqua-resin, corrugated plastic, high-density polystyrene foam, steel, glass, and cast cement. 

It was a super fun, and challenging, project. Brian (my partner) and I worked on it intensively for almost a year. Our 10-year old daughter was so over it! It was a very different way of working for me: everything had to be planned ahead, once decisions were made and things started, there was just no fudging around or changing your mind. I made a corrugated plastic model, exactly to scale, to make sure the colors I had chosen on my smaller model, worked. And guess what? I had to make some changes to my initial plan, because size, too, thoroughly influences color.

A: Anything coming up to promote?

F: You’re catching me at a weird time where I had such a crazy busy year last year that I’m really happy not to have much going now and I just feel like I need to do my taxes and organize stuff in my closets.  But in my experience, projects or opportunities often happen at the very last minute, with way too little time to actually get everything done.  I always work without a deadline, without a specific project in mind, and things fall into place only later. I just kind of work in my studio. Right now it’s weird without a studio, but I do have this idea of a series of very dark, almost pitch-black, paintings. Paintings-sculptures I mean, no right angles and no stretcher bars. I see them in my mind. A clear idea. So I have that one. I’m carrying it.