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Performance, various locations.
For the duration of one week, Vincent Chevalier will be giving himself the Red Carpet Treatment. While temporarily residing in Kitchener, he will only walk on a 2-meter length of red carpet that he will constantly (re)place in front of himself. This performance will begin the moment he steps off the train upon arrival until he returns home a week later.
Vincent Chevalier is a Montreal-based artist employing the performative qualities of disclosure as his primary medium. His projects often consist of repetitive and endurance-based tasks that attempt to bring the private into the public, the latent into view. He has exhibited locally and internationally at venues including Galérie La Centrale Powerhouse, the FOFA and CIRCA galleries in Montreal; the ANTI-Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland; and the XVI Annual International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Intermedia/Cyberarts at Concordia University in 2011.
Kyle Bishop wrote about the performance, "I had a chance to walk with Vincent during an hour or so of his performance 'The Red Carpet Treatment.' Hearing about the piece prior to seeing it caused me to wonder about the possible apparatus a person might use to walk continuously on a red carpet. Ideas ranged from a large hamster wheel lined with red carpet to a motorized set of carpet spools that would unfurl a few dozen metres at a time. I hadn't really considered that he would have such a short length of carpet (roughly 2 metres) and that he would have to bend over and pick it up himself. The act of oscillating between dominance and subservience, top and bottom, diva and PA, had an elegance that I had not anticipated. It wasn't only a piece about queer politics or artist vs. society tensions - it was also about an honest day's work. The performance felt somewhat anti-theatrical and antiheroic – like a hipster offspring of Abramovic and Tehching Hsieh . . . Vincent's own physical persona: slight frame, cuffed jeans, t-shirt, Tom Ford glasses and backpack seemed to hover between the two polarities as well. It was a subtle work that altered my own perception of scale and rhythm of a city without resorting to a self-important flaneur's approach. The walk was about walking and thinking about walking."