Monique Levesque: Why Am I Afraid to Love?

why-am-i-afraid-to-love-aphroditeValentine’s Day reception and artist talk, Saturday February 13, 7pm
Curated by Brynn McNab

“I am engulfed, I succumb…”
S’abimer/to be engulfed
Outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment.

from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse

Appropriating fantasies from teen nightmares and self-help books as a city-wide stage play, Monique Levesque unlocks her diary and her phone in the poster project Why Am I Afraid to Love? Divulging her obsessive journalling, intimate digital interactions, and one sentence romantic comedies to the geography of Vancouver, a series of graphic posters will lay bare her heart. Levesque plans to plaster these texts and txts around the city in which they were prompted, with the heart of the work resting in UNIT/PITT’s library. The writing participates in anxiety around surveillance, secrecy, vulnerability, romance, performance and gender in digital correspondence.  The proliferation of the text is an experiment concerning how artists’ and writers’ correspondence and diaries might be published from their current digital medium. What power can be claimed in the annihilation of privacy?

Artist talk and Valentine’s Day party on Saturday, February 13.

Monique Levesque was raised in the Canadian prairies by two people whose love story has proved impossible to live up to, or replicate. In 2011 Levesque acquired a BFA from Emily Carr University. Working in alignment with the history of performance in various media, she has since dedicated her work to the pursuit of the romantic comedy.

Brynn McNab graduated with a BFA in Critical and Cultural Studies from Emily Carr University by way of Film Production from NSCAD University. Since then, her work has included writing, curating and editing, including the relaunch of ISSUE magazine in 2014. She is currently interested in an expanded field of writing, which incorporates casual correspondence and co-production.