Abstract

Laure Prouvost's multimedia art uses storytelling, quick cuts, montage and surround sound to evoke softness, gentleness, smell and pain. Simultaneously operating on four different levels - textual, sound track, voice track and image - her videos play with filmic conventions, forcing her viewers to consider how they perceive space, sound and text. Whereas her deliberate misspellings question our relationship with language, her laconic commentary anticipates our consumption of her work, making it both rhetorically and sensorially seductive. The sensorial effectiveness thus created by Prouvost's use of medial artifacts and language in "Swallow" (2013) and "Wantee" (2013) blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, redefines cultural memory and perception and, in so doing, addresses fundamental issues of poetics and aesthetics.