Maria Legault at Offthemapgallery, Toronto

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MARIA PLUS ONE presents:
SANS ISSUE (DEAD END)
Installation & performance by Maria Legault
Curator Istvan Kantor

maria legault, Plus One's Retreat, Roost/Performance

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Maria Plus One presents: Plus One’s Roast
THURSDAY May 25th, 7pm - 10pm
at Offthemapgallery, 712 Lansdowne

You are cordially invited to Plus One’s roast, an evening where friends, ex-lovers and well-wishers will give Plus One the attention he deserves. Stories will be told, praises will be sung and true colors revealed. Expect surreal surprises and glorified disappointments. This macabre theatre promises to disturb even the inanimate.

*Juicy speeches by artist extraordinaires Jessica Rose,
Auriane Sokoloski, and Istvan Kantor.

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SANS ISSUE (DEAD END)
CURATORIAL PREFACE: Melting chocolate cakes, theatrical transformations, licking, sucking, fake nurses, pseudo-terrorists, sugar-addict, rioter to hunger-maniac, video combined with live action, the circus of wedding... I gathered these short descriptive notes while trying to sum up Maria's work. She is one of the new local art-heroines and emerging anti-art princesses whose work i have been following with great attention. I vandalized one of her installations by licking off a chocolate message she made on the gallery wall, and i opposed her marriage to Plus One. It's a great pleasure for me to be her partner in crime aka the curator for her OFFTHEMAPGALLERY murder event.
Istvan Kantor, Curator

MARIA PLUS ONE: For the last year I have performed contemporary love rituals with a life-sized puppet named Plus One. Plus One and I got happily married and honeymooned across the world. But now, we are miserable. We are living unhappily ever after. It is hard to pin point exactly when the fairy tale romance collapsed, but love no longer exists between us. Plus One and I have tried every therapeutic method known to restore our love but nothing is working. The time has come to pop this melodramatic love bubble once and for all. However, will a break-up suffice? Where will an inanimate puppet go, if we part company? Poor Plus One would always be alienated from language, intimacy, and to the human condition; a fate nobody should have to tolerate. The only question is, how can he cease existing if he is not alive?
Maria Plus One, artist

OFFTHEMAP: Legault's whirlwind romance with Plus One and the art world has taken her to many national and international venues. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and has received many scholarships and grants for her work. She has been written up and interviewed by Radio Canada, the Toronto Star, Canadian Art, and Now Magazine. The immediacy and vibrancy of Canadian art is kept alive by Legault and works like hers. Offthemapgallery is very pleased to host and support Legault; her explorations, her expressions, and her experimentations.
Antonia Lancaster, Director, Offthemapgallery

PLUS ONE'S RETREAT

Dear Maria,
This letter will probably come as a surprise since you never knew what was going on in my head. Truth is, nothing was happening in my head, but now something has changed, I have started to think, and it is horrible. This sudden and sporadic onset of thinking is really affecting my quality of life. It is as though a broken record with the bleakest lyrics is constantly running through my mind. If thinking means bleak ruminations about being a perpetual outsider, I want no part in it.

I appreciate your attempts to help me find my home, but the continuous failure to fit in anywhere is becoming too painful. The only thing all these trips did was rub in the devastating truth that I would be doomed to a life of being the other. I feel like a buffoon, as though my only function is to denounce and make people feel good about themselves because they are not as strange as me. I make children laugh but always to the detriment of my dignity. I can see the glimmers of disdain in their eyes. I can smell their pity.

None of this bothered me when I was floating through life in comfortable vacuous numbness. However, now that I am thinking about it. the truth of my existence is impossible to face and I hope to find solace in death. I hope that through death I can return to a a state of non-thinking akin to a deep meditation. I realize that no matter how much I try, I will always be an outsider to the world of humans and it is with great relief that I have decided to leave it.

As for you, my dear Maria, it is best to end this nightmarish fairytale once and for all. We were living in a love bubble of your own making and now that it has popped there is nothing between us. I can see the contempt on your face, and am sorry for all the pain and frustration I caused you. I know you really tried to make our relationship work and I am grateful for this, albeit futile, effort. I know you will suffer from my departure but it will be less painful than the confusing illusion of togetherness we were hiding under. If I had a heart, it would be broken right now. If I were human, I would be full of regret and would cry so much that I could barely breath. You deserve better than me.

Please accept my apologies and know that I will do everything in my power to help you find true love soon. Our romance was a theatre and you deserve the real thing. Amorous posturing has it's limits, especially in bed.

With love,
Plus One

PLUS ONE'S ROAST

.........Plus One's Retreat, Roost/Performance........