Caroline St-Laurent Tandem: Portrait of Paracyclists Shawna Ryan and Joanie Caron
© Caroline St-Laurent, Tandem, 2021. Photo : Geneviève Moreau
The exhibition Tandem: Portrait of Paracyclists Shawna Ryan and Joanie Caron by Caroline St-Laurent features a 45-minute sequence shot that follows Shawna Ryan and Joanie Caron, two high-level cyclists riding their competition bikes. Conceived in part during a production residency at OBORO in 2020, the video follows Ryan and Caron as they talk about their experiences as female athletes and, in Shawna’s case, as a person with low vision. They introduce us to the coded language that facilitates their communication, before presenting themselves and recounting the events that led them to the 2016 Rio Olympics. They then dive into the difficulties encountered, as well as the moments of empowerment experienced in relation to their gender and to Shawna’s disability.
The project also includes an accessible version of the video (contrasted and simplified image) and a sound composition, created with artist and sound engineer Stéphane Claude, focusing on Shawna’s sensory compensations, necessary for her limited vision. A bas-relief installed on the wall opposite the video accentuates the idea of the cycling duo’s collaborative model and suggests another “tandem”, that of the capturing device made up of a driver, the director of photography and the pointer that ensures the image’s sharpness.
In the lobby, the athletes’ thighs have been reproduced in bronze to emphasize their power and shapes, sculpted by years of training. They are shown in all their robustness, magnifying their virility and thumbing their noses at the harsh criticism of female athletes’ bodies, which are often deemed too “masculine”, in order to encourage the dismantling of gender stereotypes and to promote other models of the female body.
Caroline would especially like to thank athletes Shawna Ryan and Joanie Caron, collaborating artists Stéphane Claude and Léna Mill-Reuillard, as well as the entire crew for the sequence shot in 2021 and the technical test in 2019. She would also like to thank the artist-run centre OBORO for the weeks of production residency and for hosting this exhibition, as well as Didier Morelli for writing the text. The project was made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Further readings:
© Caroline St-Laurent, Tandem, 2021. Photo : Geneviève Moreau
Caroline St-Laurent is a queer visual artist specializing in the intersection of arts and sports with a feminist perspective. In a multidisciplinary practice based on performance and video, she collaborates with athletes, professional or amateur sportswomen and performing artists from different fields, to investigate the cult of performance and reflect on equity, accessibility and social justice. Her work has been showed in individual and collective exhibitions in Quebec and abroad; live art events as well as video festivals. Recently, she presented the conference-performance Women Performing ART+SPORT with Liliane Moussa in Montreal (2022) as well as at the CAFKA Festival in Ontario (2021). She also collaborated with Moussa for Nadia, est-ce que ça va ? touring in Maisons de la culture in Montreal (2023) and at Tangente (2019).