Proulx's project involves a complex relationship with Anne Hébert 's Premier jardin (1988). The novel, in part, deals with an actress in a thinly veiled Québec City. Filled with theatrical referencing (from Molière to Beckett), this was transformed by Proulx into a book of photographs and appropriated texts in four acts, furthering the underlying theatrical aspect of the source novel.
Proulx has been trying different forms of dealing with this processing of the literary source material. The related gallery statement explains:
Through its new iterations, however, the exhibited and then printed work has been transformed, engaged in a process of reinterpretation, translation and remediation. What distinguishes the present iteration from its predecessors is that this time the ensemble is standing on a stage.
Rather than a translation, there are two distinct constructs that have been born from this interrelationship. "This new exhibition takes shape precisely in the meeting of these two solitudes on the same stage."
What happens here, turns almost entirely on the question of scale and shape. With the space turned into a black box and using large-scale display curtains, it wears its theatrical aspect on its sleeve. It is "theatrical" if not theatrical. It would be more accurate to say it's closer to a theme park than a theatre.
The results feel like a deconstructed movie trailer, perhaps a rather obvious way of re-imaging the photo book. This immersive tendency also makes it seem like a more low-tech and low-budget version of mega art expos, such as the Bridgerton or Van Gogh ones that floated through town recently. While this isn't as enjoyable as a B-movie rip-off of a Hollywood Biblical epic, it has its charms.
It does raise uncomfortable questions, like why show books in galleries at all? Does this actually make much sense for either medium? I've never encountered an exhibition where it managed to be much more than a library vitrine (the show at artexte directly beneath it had this librarian's fantasy of representation and the role of books).
It's the book as a form that loses out here. These sorts of exhibitions come off more as acts of aggression against books than anything else.
Between Hébert's book and its appropriation by Proulx, it is transformed into a series of interjections from one to the other, although it is clearly the case that Hébert has been gutted, the skin dried and used as an accoutrement for the photography, which in turn seems to live in its presence, with the book becoming their environment for presentation.
When such an adventure moves media, shifting from one location to another, it becomes something fundamentally different.
What is curated on view at Vox is a way of addressing the ostensible narrative content of the book (and Proulx's encounter with the book), not so much the book as a medium, which here is turned into another set of photos, clumsily leaned against the wall like large Styrofoam rocks on a set for ancient rituals. Not object enough to be sculptural or to unbalance the privileging of text as text, they feel more like wall texts for a children's museum.
Although the accompanying exhibition text by Marie J. Jean tries to justify some of the exhibition with an appeal to Blanchot's L'espace littéraire, what seems at play is more like something that occurs outside of that, in a kind of non-event before its possibility.
What has always given artist's books whatever vitality they might have possessed, has come to a significant degree from the fact that they are escapes from the general tendencies of Contemporary Art exhibition and performativity. This is also what's most interesting about the exhibition, which is effectively a recolonisation of art by institutionality.
None of this hyperbolic language is intended negatively; it's simply that in its most intriguing (and dramatic) implications, that's how it comes across.