Lasserre, Fabienne

Fabienne Lasserre grew up in Montreal, Canada, and she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is included in several private collections in Canada and the United States. Lasserre’s practice is a stubborn imposition of her wishes and politics on matter, and a learned and forced flexibility regarding its rebuke of her intentions. She uses malleable materials—felt, fabric—that have a non-hierarchical structure, in which no part differs, dominates or leads. Paint is liminal: fluid and solid, simultaneously matter (substance) and illusion (depiction). Lasserre’s pieces straddle painting and sculpture, operating from an “excluded middle”—what is left out when things are divided into categories. Feminist thought and the body are central. These concerns extend to her interest in science fiction, in which “truth” is stretched, mixed, turned over. The departure from realism permits a re-evaluation of what is assumed to be natural. Lasserre stretches and elongates forms, arriving at shapes and volumes through pressure and touch, a blind effort to get somewhere without a plan. She warps, twists, leans, and stacks because these states evoke a rich array of relations of desire, repulsion, aggression, cooperation, affection, mercy, and cruelty.