Combining painting and quilting, his work brings together a variety of fabrics and patterns, sewn into what often resemble the areal views of land allotments. The fabrics can be suggestive in their tactility or evocative in their selected details, such as the appearance of part of a buttoned shirt.
There is not much of a rationale presented for Blondeau’s work. On his website, he couches it in vaguely Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, referencing rhizomes and insisting on a sort of territoriality in the work. The work is taken to be an expression of the specific material qualities of Laval, filtered through the phenomenal recollections of his childhood (sheets, grandmother’s quilts) and trash.
Although he divorces his work’s reliance on re-appropriated refuse from any concern with environmentalism or “the land” conceptualized in the terms that have become more generic to Contemporary Art, the work functions as a kind of anti-map-making through the detritus of his surroundings. They don’t really lead you anywhere but they are sensual.
While it is visually reminiscent of the kind of space where abstraction and Pop were thought to overlap in the 1960s, a space that attracted a dozen names from critics which are now forgotten, and where craft and industrialized products met to be sewn together and the avant-garde came to look remarkably like a parody of traditional craft, there’s a little more going on.
What sets them apart from similar work is their processional quality, something rare to this sort of quilted work. While it is common to have a sense of inflation and the varied nuances of relief that come with stuffed works verging on soft sculpture, in this case, there is a ragged, almost cartoonishly gory sense of the assemblage on display.
The cartooning of territorialization gets a very different quality in the exhibition Eshi uapatakau ishkueuatsh tshitassinu/Regards de femmes sur le territoire at Galerie UQAM. Consisting of the work of three artists - Marie-Andrée Gill, Sophie Kurtness, Soleil Launière - who have been curated by Sonia Robertson, their works are broken up into distinct spaces of the gallery, sitting together but not really communicating.
You have to drift through it. It's not the trudge of an unfamiliar and disorienting territory because it has the same freeze-dried quality of dozens of similar shows I've seen in the past decade or two. There is something overly precious and rote about so much of it.
Thankfully, there is one comparatively delightful exception. To her credit, Marie-Andrée Gill avoids the cliché-addled work of her two piers and presents something different. CÉLINE KUSHPU is still highly sentimental and works through the appropriation of a different set of kitsch referents self-consciously. However, in her case, the primary focus is Céline Dion, whose iconic quality is balanced with a Legoland notion of the territory which is substantially more subversive than the general curatorial ambitions of recent shows like Maison modèle (even if the work in that exhibition directly contradicted those ambitions). That Clark show also employed the clichéd tree imagery that appears here, but in this case it comes off more like a gag.
One can read it satirically or sincerely and it strikes me (perhaps falsely) as mostly the latter. Containing a mixture of poetry, wall affirmations, and found objects, it is made of the kind of familiar industrialized "folk culture" that was the reserve of what's been generically termed Pop since the 1950s. But while that was generally marked by a strong anti-nostalgia and corrosively ambiguous humour, something closer to the opposite is presented here.
From George-Hébert Germain’s 1997 book on Céline Dion, she concocts a little poetic universe, introduced by a Lite-Brite title. Spanning two walls is a selection of poems composed out of cut-ups from the text. The elevated items, set on brightly painted plinths of varying heights, are fairly uninspired selections of industrial products in the appropriation vein. Most successful among them is a little diorama constructed from Lego, but as a whole, it is full of gaps and a clunky sense of objects in space. If anything, the work is more kitsch in its various strategies than in its ostensible content.
In line with the insistence of its curatorial framing, and if you are inclined to pathologize art practice, one can read the work in therapeutic terms as a crafting mishmash to deal with something or other, or one can recognize that, whatever the intention, the qualities of the work itself (plastic and symbolic) undermine this pathos and seem to mock it. Nowhere is this more blatant than in the “affirmation” room (complete with automatic photo pasted to the wall) which is either a naive temple of narcissism or a mockery of the vacuity of the therapeutic ideal that is deployed to curate the work.
Outside of Gill's actual work, its curatorial encoding of kitsch (technocratic and industrial imperialism expressed in the therapeutic clichés of bonheur) perhaps accidentally suggests something I have become increasingly to suspect, namely that rhetoric about decolonisation and the actual practice of "cultural" imperialism are mostly interchangeable: “It is a word that does not take itself seriously, where laughter has its place, typical of the laughing people from whom it comes. Authentic, humble, it is inspired by popular culture. Kitsch, which itself served to de-aestheticize art, could be linked to a desire to decolonise speech and make it accessible to all.”
If Blondeau’s work is assemblage by sensuality with no particular referent, Gill is all referent and sentimentality with little sensuality.