Mountain Laurel at Comfort Station, Logan Square

Can You Steal From a River?

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Grace Papineau-Couture [Mountain Laurel] is currently featured in Home Grown Vol. III at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art​
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Grace Papineau-Couture's collection of invented instruments and performance piece,Can You Steal From a River?, reflect on environmental change and disaster through folkloric and primeval aesthetics. Grace's instruments combine hand forged metals and wood sourced from many of Chicago's interstitial natural spaces. Bounded by highways and major arteries, these interstitial natural spaces form grey areas between the natural and urban -- by blending these reclaimed natural objects and industrial metals, Grace materializes the increasingly blurred relationship we have between the urban and natural, or the push and pull between familiar modern life and archaic fears. Each sculpture reads as both instrument and ritualistic object, speaking to the link between the sublime and the known.

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Performance Piece

 

Can You Steal From a River? is a sound piece synthesizing spoken word, live looping and audio manipulation with found sounds and invented instruments made from materials found in Chicago's natural spaces. Sonically separating the urban and natural environments becomes difficult for visitors seeking reprieve from concrete. While visiting green spaces (Chicago parks and nature preserves) in the middle of the city, they seem to shrink, becoming increasingly difficult to find oneself lost in, alienating visitors from a true relationship to nature -- mirroring the increased frequency of larger scale environmental destruction due to wildfires and other natural disasters as a result of rapid industrialization across the globe. Can You Steal From a River? reflects on themes of loss and how we might allow nature to imprint itself on us as it seems to disappear.

 

About the Artist

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With a material interest in using sound as raw material, Mountain Laurel pulls apart ritual and superstition through field recordings, sampling, and uncanny instruments.
Focusing on low-tech, ordinary objects as sonic instruments, they construct haunting sound that articulates breakage and variance within loops, repetitive action, and ritualization of labour. By using industrial materials like sheet metal alongside natural objects such as tree branches as instruments, the artist materializes the blurred relationship between modern life and archaic fears through sound.

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Grace Papineau-Couture is a Canadian-American sound artist living and working in Chicago, IL. They received their MFA from Columbia College Chicago. An artist and performer, Grace has exhibited their work across Canada, the US -- most recently in Hyde Park Art Center’s “Ground Floor” exhibition, a solo show at Gallery 4009 titled “Rituals I Can’t Complete” and at the University of London, UK. She has also shown work at dc3 arts in Alberta, High Concept Labs, Purple Window Gallery and Comfort Station in Chicago. Grace performs live and records experimental music and sound art under the name Mountain Laurel. You can find Grace's long-form sound compositions on bandcamp at mountainlaurel.bandcamp.com

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