residence: Les Ramsay interview
The Adventures of Atrevida Reef, 2019. Exhibition view, Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal. Photo credits: Paul Litherland
A conversation conducted between Montréal and London with writer and editor Nathalie Agostini and Canadian painter Les Ramsay on the concept of “weird,” collecting, and language.
Let’s start with a quote of yours from a previous interview: “I’m big on trying to outweird myself… I need that challenge or else it’s easy for things to become just decorative.” Around the advent of photography, Walter Benjamin defined the concept of “aura” as the quality essential to an artwork that cannot be mediated through techniques of mechanical reproduction. How do you see the relationship between the concepts of “weird” and “aura” when it comes to a quality that cannot be mediated technically, and mass-produced?
