They occupy (more or less) separate spaces. The video has its own white room with a bench. The book sits on a shelf suspended from a brutalist surface. It can be flipped through. Facing it is a wall of names, arranged alphabetically like the dead at a cenotaph, of the artists that she examined. A book of her own, fastened so it cannot be leafed through, provides an additional joining point, sitting at the entrance to the video like a prop for a staged memorial.
The artist and Le Devoir cast it in these terms:
“My research residency at Artexte was guided by the desire to take these artists out of their boxes and often out of oblivion, to treat each of them equally, in the hope of making them dialogue through selected visual and textual fragments. During the exhibition, this inventory will take the form of an installation consisting of a looped black and white projection of nearly 200 images. A sort of collage of still images, accompanied by a soundtrack, an archival document and a tribute wall to the artists mentioned.” From this documentation, Jodoin created a grand narrative that allowed her to create links across all the practices of these creative women. “This collage, this great orchestration weaves a narrative with multiple voices telling the story of a daughter composing an abstract portrait of her mother. This will be done through the images and words of artists from the archives, speaking subjectivities of an intimate and poetic narrative oscillating between the private and the public, reality and fiction, past and present. This exhibition is a reflection on desire, dreams, lacks, the banality of life, old age, memory, mourning and forgetting.”
There are three basic orientations: visual-tactile, visual-non-tactile, and audio-visual. It is the last of these that comes through in the video, but the sounds creep into the rest of the exhibition. The video is composed of 182 black and white images taken of the archive. This includes fragments of text (either flatly captured or at the angles of curving pages) and photographs which are cropped, truncated or reconfigure with blank spaces by her camera. Across all of this plays a minimalist soundtrack by Karen Trask.
Sometimes the visuals of the video take the object as an image, sometimes the image as an object. It is the minimization of tones (visual and sonic) that creates the atmosphere that gives the work its effectiveness. A variance in gradient is one of the primary sources of visual curiosity. The mechanism she’s constructed is so taut that the content is made secondary. Not that it ever seems lazily curated or thoughtless. Rather, it is so severely reductive that the proliferation of “dedications” that she makes seem like apologies or distractions.
Each image shifts at (what I counted as) a five or six-second interval (given that it is constructed of 182 images spanning twenty-one minutes and fifteen seconds it could be seven seconds). It was unclear to me if there was a slight variance to keep it mildly off-kilter. If you breathe in its rhythm, you may feel slightly dazed after a few minutes, like huffing the dust of an archive.
Only Artexte has no dust; it is a very sterile environment. This may be why the exhibition suggests so much the romance of sterility, a quality the artist admirably takes advantage of. It is almost as though she takes Adolf Loos’ injunction against the eroticism of ornament to the extreme in which it inverts itself and the reductiveness of her surfaces gains a perversely animated quality.
Jodoin has been doing this reductive game for so long that one can admire the stubbornness and rigour of it or regard it as something of a crutch, like the psychoanalytic clichés she tends to rely on (absence, trauma, lack) to frame her work. I will admit to being generally hostile to deliberate uses of black and white because I find it excessively authoritarian and that it gives a false aura of spirituality to work. In this case, at least, it appears deliberately perverse.
Jodoin has not been reluctant to cast her work in these terms. She has been adamant that they are works of “purification” allowing for the creation of an “intimate” and “grey space” in which the frisson of “modesty” can be experienced. If previous work tended to take exacto knives to historical objects in order to construct this mechanism, they were usually spread around space using an inventive means of emplacement that commanded a peculiar and sometimes surprising physical interaction with the work. That is not really the case here. It is more standard museal and the wall of names is an unfortunately obvious and heavy-handed gesture amid the delicacy and rigour of the other work.
A stumble like that essentially “pollutes” (to keep within her puritanical rhetoric) the exhibition with the sort of neo-liberal aesthetics of previous shows in the same space. Jodoin's work is generally too rigid to employ such forced heterogeneity. Her puritanism is not like Claude Tousignant's reductive drive for “pure chroma” that would allow the transgression of the limits of the subject-object to reveal thinghood, but is essentially a psychodrama constructed to do the inverse, bleeding the chroma from the world to interpolate a purely fantastical transhistorical subject.
Rather than read it in the terms Jodoin offered the media, it may be more convincing to look at the exhibition in terms of other work she has done, such as her bookwork a catalogue of artificial sentiments (2016), which juxtaposed found images with “factual descriptions of flowers. These newly arranged combinations question artificial representations and the idealization of sentiments.” Whatever else Jodoin may be doing in d’un seul souffle, she is certainly constructing an idealized and sentimentalized image of the archive, one which has been given a mystical quality, like the imaginary contents alluded to in her open letters series (2013). And, in light of the claims of her broader body of work, one should question the mystification of the work of art that is intrinsic to her practice, in this case in the service of a mythologization of The Female Artist and the Archive.
Despite the framing she places around the work, the fingerprint on it all is Jodoin. Far from being a “sea of voices” as one of the accompanying texts asserts, it always comes back to this, and far beyond the performed “presence” of “her” hand appearing in some of the images (one of the exhibitions other notably clunky gestures). And far from it demonstrating any coherent or meaningful connection between several generations of female artists, it shows how arbitrary this is. As Gary Indiana once said of the black and white work of Irving Penn, no matter what he photographed, whether it was a celebrity, a shampoo bottle, or a tribesman, it still just looks like Irving Penn. Like all memorials, this one is also mostly an act of erasing.