Reviews: Jocelyne Alloucherie at Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert | Frances Adair Mckenzie at Fonderie Darling
The works by Jocelyne Alloucherie on display at Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert are split between a series of photo/drawing collages and a video. In one room there are diptychs and triptychs. They feature photos of clouds and drawings of them, layered to give a sense of depth and dynamism. These, the accompanying text informs us, are preliminary models for a public work to be shown at Viau metro.
In the other room is a video featuring historic gardens. Sparse figures drift through the frame under mostly empty skies. Like the photos, these have been made over time and spliced together with a soundtrack. The video is supposed to be shown simultaneously with another that shares the same soundtrack, projected blind, in a structure suggesting a Greek amphitheatre. There is even a small scale model of this on display.
These works are fragments of a larger body of work that falls under the header of La chambre des ombres which she has been showing in galleries around the world for years. Most of this work follows a similar pattern, with treated photos of clouds and skies set with minimalistic plinths and monoliths either at a scale close to the images or miniaturized.
Hardly registering as sculpture or architecture, it comes off more like a theatre maquette, although one that is not large enough to actually be theatrical or give a dramatic sense to space, and not small enough to create the unique and complex experience of the alien qualities of miniaturization. Instead, it runs this middle ground of familiarity with its building block forms and just exaggerated images. As a result, everything feels very framed. Even the photographic work comes off as more frame than image, which is not to suggest that they have melted into their material supports. On the contrary, the general sense of all the work is the lack of anything to support: props for a sky that has been de-realized by art. In this sense, they are quite effective as “shadows.”
The diptychs of latex and inkjet print on aluminum that are displayed are starkly split between a muted colour rectangle and a more elongated one primarily in greys. The treatment of the colour aspect sometimes suggests a filmy mildew or scum build-up on the surface. Layered in these shapes, they also suggest the blockiness of the other shows in this body of work while not relying on the various monoliths to stress their bewildering sense of scale. Particularly in photographic reproduction, their quality as pieces of a set is clear.
In the book that accompanies the general series of exhibitions, Alloucherie explains a lot of this in anecdotal and autobiographical terms, relating a memory of the depopulated landscape at the edge of the urban sphere that reflects the sky in its shadows or stands aloft and vacant. “This is where I started chasing shadows on the ground. […] on this autumn morning, in this small, slightly anachronistic town in the north of France, which I could have made into a precise photographic document that would have dispensed with this account. Some images need to be told.” [Jocelyne Alloucherie, La cahier des ombres (Center d'art de Kerguéhennec, 2017), 10]
This is where the general tension in the work is: between the fleeting experience of climates and atmospheres and the parallel world of the document, the work of art that is both a cast of the shadow of these phenomena and that which then casts its shadow back over them. Much of this body of work is about suggesting a space that could cast shadows and be one with the climate versus its reality in a flatly-lit climate-controlled environment.
The exhibition text at Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert ends with a quotation from Baudelaire about the narcotic effects that come from contemplating the sublime shifts of clouds, concluding, “Strangely enough, not once, in the face of these liquid or aerial magics, did I complain about the absence of man.” From this vantage point, one can see in Alloucherie’s project that the anachronism of the work of art, that thing that “dispenses” with accounts, is what needs to be dealt with by embalming it with the theatrical paraphernalia of “telling.”
Frances Adair Mckenzie’s Private Life at Fonderie Darling
Frances Adair Mckenzie’s Private Life at Fonderie Darling presents another strategy of mummification. It relies on a relationship to architecture too but in a very different way. In fact, the central aspect of the exhibition is to treat various aspects of (mostly proto-) cinematic devices as sculptural or architectural forms.
Mckenzie claims to address how technological acceleration has moved into the domestic sphere, changing the life therein, and operating as the mediator with the world. Screens are the privileged icon of this and she deals with them using sculpture rather than digital technologies. This gesture is part of a general strategy of alienation by the use of anachronism to create a kind of “historical” distance.
Amid the various semi-transparent screens that break up the space like a makeshift hospital ward, there are simplified shapes (half moons, etc.) that suggest those of furnishings, in particular, the circular bed of Hugh Hefner in the Playboy mansion. Posed on these shapes are various hybrid sculptures inspired by poses taken from art history (why art history rather than Playboy itself?) and melded with blossoming erotic pillows. Fashioned from glass and wire in the manner of traditional glass lamps, their webbed frames are a way of figuring digital technology. The various figures are connected by wires running through the crevices of the floor to dramatize their “wired” quality.
Cast at very different scales, some of the figures are large and furniture-like while others are miniaturized, poking out from the structures of the room and hiding in its crevices. Thematically, this seems to work out quite clearly given how the photography of Playboy embedded its models in the environment that surrounded them. Indeed, their elaborate colour co-ordination, use of geometry, extremely careful set dressing, and elaborate lighting that lifted ambient objects and furnishings to a status rare in figurative photography, subtly achieved the kind of hybridization of space, theme, and subject she seems to be analyzing, which in her work comes off more like Barbapapa than Playboy bunny, suggesting a romance of artifice rather than an eroticism of surface.
One could put this exhibition in the context of the recent erotic art shows in the city or espace’s attempt to think about post-pornography. And one could argue that it deals with many of the things that come up in those contexts better than much of what they discuss or than artists have tended to broach recently, although it does so with a similar strategy, not really engaging with pornography but turning back to art history and being sure to enframe it all with a decontaminating rhetoric cribbed from queer theory.
The video tour, in some ways, is more interesting than attending the show in person because of the way it breaks up space and condenses time. Given the ostensible subject matter, it might have engaged with the material more complexly through appropriating the visual rhetoric of trash documentaries like A&E’s Secrets of Playboy (2022-2023), mondo films, or even Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Instead, it is a rather flat “artists’ talk” quality, with static shots of labour and panning shots of the depopulated exhibition space.
The exhibition is clothed in appeals to the history of structural cinema, something that, at least superficially, would seem to make far more sense in dealing with hard rather than soft pornography. Ultimately, the exhibition is more convincingly about types of paracinema than anything else.
In her video, Mckenzie refers to suspended animation and structural film several times. Halting any typical kind of mechanical animation, the action of the exhibition transpires in the interaction between the various objects she's constructed with light and the architecture of the foundry. The visual qualities of the sculptures change with the shifts of light over the duration of the day. While the gallery does remain open from noon until 7PM three evenings a week and 10PM on Thursdays, and this does allow for the experience of shifts in natural light patterns (augmented by artificial light), given that the viewer cannot spend the duration of the night in the gallery (and without the intervention performed by this augmentation), this functions more as a tease than an actuality and the denial of this sensual experience (the animation of darkness itself and the visceral experience of the vanishings that it performs) makes up most of the “life” of the exhibition. This is a thematically interesting point, and the closest it comes to the aesthetics of softcore, but one which seems to work against the thematic of the wired blurring of domestic and commercial space.
In person, Mckenzie’s exhibition becomes about the boredom of being in the presence of the artwork, animated and sentimentalized in an incremental lived time that theatricalizes a subjection to externality; a kind of return to “nature” through the appeal to light. An interesting contrast to Alloucherie’s severe artificiality, which is a more effective kind of suspended animation and a starker dramatization of the domestication of space by art.