MONTREAL: Fonderie Darling: David Arseneau

David Arseneau’s current work, SUPER F13 PART 1 TO PART 12 REDESIGN, recaptures a youthful undercurrent. Reflected in his choice of media and subject matter as well as in his compulsive treatment of them, Arseneau’s interest in the 1980s grotesque horror movie franchise Friday the 13 ^th, gives way to an obsessive catalogue that extirpates characters and contexts from all twelve films. Working through various media, the work’s offbeat style betrays the significance of its achievements. As its central theme, Friday the 13 ^th acts as a pretext for the exploration of new forms of expression that push the production of the work to the limits of its own reflection: sketches of the victims and survivors are crudely drawn in pencil (SF13 Characters); a makeshift video game offers a tour of Crystal Lake (SF13 Video Game); a mapping project imagines all locations across a single landscape (SF13 Super Map); an exhaustive inventory indexes all the weapons and items used (SF13 Items and Weapons); a collection of movie posters from all twelve films are faithfully reproduced (SF13 Posters). While these offshoots suggest the artist’s compulsive desire to capture everything,
they also insinuate an attempt to trivialize the horror within these films by uprooting it.