Joé Côté-Rancourt
Joé Côté-Rancourt is a multidisciplinary artist whose work revolves around the theme of construction—both physical and social. His pieces explore how things are built, how they fall apart, and who benefits from these movements. He completed a Bachelor’s degree in Sculpture at Concordia University in 2019. During his studies, his project “Tired Students” was acquired by the university's Fine Arts department to be permanently displayed in its inner courtyard. Joé works as a technician for the Fine Arts department at Concordia, specifically in the wood, foundry, and digital fabrication labs. He also serves as a co-curator and technician at the Fofa Gallery. Active in the theater scene as an actor, he is set to present his first scenographic collaboration in Quebec City this November. In February, Joé traveled to Iceland for his first international artist residency at the NES artist residency. Joé is interested in how and why things are shown. His position within the art community and his involvement in cultural dissemination in Montreal and Quebec City continually inform his reflections.
Collect Bean: What does growth mean to you?
Joé Côté-Rancourt: Learning, that's what growth means to me; learning new techniques, new material, new people, and the history of lands and peoples. I feel that, like a tree, we are blind to where we grow up, and with a blind trust in where it will bring us, it is worth it. I'm far from the eyes-on-the-prize mindset, especially in the last five years, and it's so freeing!
Collect Bean: How do you approach the balance between experimentation and consistency in your art?
Joé Côté-Rancourt: Experimentation, for me, is the best way to learn. I'm always eager to learn something new, run a test, or take up a new project I don't fully control. It's my favorite way to keep my imagination plastic. Consistency manifests in series I, in which I create rules around; as I'm working with a wide variety of mediums, I tend to encapsulate some ways of working/relation to materials in series that I come back to when the material is available, or I feel like I want to go back to those questions/feelings. With the relationship between artist and viewer that has been changed a lot by the internet, I often see consistency as a main point of focus for many creative people. I get that, especially with the need to earn a living linked with artmaking. But for me, it kills my expression; for me, the art piece is the result of questions and variables of material, time, and body capability, it shouldn't be controlled in a consistent way.
Collect Bean: What is something that you do to stay focused?
Joé Côté-Rancourt: Ayayaye...Being focused is a hard task for an artist with ADHD who wants to work with every material I can find in the trash héhéhé. The best way for me is to keep notes of where I'm at with every project that I want to materialize and take the time to organize my material in the studio. At some moment, I'll see I have a time that would fit a certain project, or a missing material or tool appears for a window of time, and I jump on the occasion. Oh, and playing in the studio, in the notebook, in a Photoshop file, with the material I find in my walks and doing quick assemblage with... I also put a lot of importance on the difference between sleep and the awake state and tried to note down what happened there. Most of the time, images appear or tests I should try. Those always feel so authentic to me and can't be explained as well as words can. Revitalize my focus and my will to work in the studio.
Collect Bean: Are there any recurring themes or motifs in your art, and if so, what do they represent to you?
Joé Côté-Rancourt: Landscape, and not only by representing nature and its (scale) relation to the body. I see the landscape as a distant and un-focus point of view that tries to frame ecosystems and the relation between things. I feel like the representation of all the landscapes we are subject to is deeply political, especially linked to private property of buildings, lands, and advertisement spaces. I think motifs and portraits can portray the effect of the landscape, but the fighting ground is the landscape.
Collect Bean: Are there any artists or movements that have inspired or influenced your work?
Joé Côté-Rancourt: So many, and I'm lucky to have a beautiful community around me that influences my work in the daily. But to name 3, I would go for a chronological order: Tom Wesselmann, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Diyar Mayil.
Tom Wesselmann influenced my early years by his way of destroying the canvas and blurring what could and should be considered a painting or the subject of a painting. The colors, the multiple subjects, the absence of what is represented, and the materialization of drawn lines into metal lines were a really new way to see what my notebook sketch could materialize.
I was introduced to Mierle Laderman Ukeles' work while I was a janitor in a hospital; her way of bringing the care and materializing it in the art diffusion space in a way that was so strong and impossible not to process deeply touched me. It truly spun my world around and made my work more linked to the lives of others and not only my personal story. Also, her later work with polluted fields is still so strong on the impact of what art can lead movement can do. I have the uppermost respect for her.
The 3rd artist I want to name is Diyar Mayil, who is originally from Istanbul and is now working in Montréal. She worded it on her website, "She addresses issues of comfort, discomfort, adaptation and the acceptance of different bodies in public and private contexts." Her art just magically works. The balance of her work is astonishing; she uses various materials, text, and actions with a beautiful understanding of what they offer. Mayil has a talent for using materials economically; it's never too much or not enough; she brings me to an exact position with every piece I've seen of her. I think everybody should see SWEEP (2022), BRUSH CLOCK (2021), DUSTPAN (2021) and GUESTBOOK (2021).
