Gilles Goyette is a self-taught painter, poet, photographer, and composer of music and sound (often for contemporary dance, resulting in a 2010 Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination).

In the “Suites” of House of ShAkE, his work is represented by sound paintings, the ongoing Bathroom Monologues series (the first, now online, is a “portrait” of dancer Danielle Baskerville), and Lost in Light (selected by NOW Magazine as a “must-see show” of the 2015 Toronto Contact Festival).

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His visual art is now available for sale online. And his contributions to the development of House of ShAkE have been decisive on many levels.

“As an artist – and formalist – my main interest lies in how different media mean. And because I work in a number of media, I’m also aware of certain overlaps between them, and of the potential to exploit uncharted meanings by mixing and matching grammars in unusual ways (sound painting, for example). In a sense, I’m searching for the ultimate form to embody my own personal language: highly abstract, usually contrapuntal in texture, combining elements of light, sound and text; ‘double-blind’ experiments, improvisation, automatic handwriting. In the final analysis, the hardest thing for me has always been to accept what’s down on the page. So, if my art is about anything, it is first and foremost about the necessity of itself, a phenomenon of being, always in motion, always yearning for stillness. – Method. Theory. These are only secondary in importance. Knowledge combined with inspiration leads to greater depths of experience, and these little ‘movements of the soul’ compel me in ways I don’t always understand. But in the process of making art, I am also making reality, leaving a trail of new meaning in my wake.” Gilles Goyette