According to the curatorial text for Marie-Danielle Duval’s Emerald Room at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau:
The exhibition presents a series of intimate paintings and drawings featuring black female figures inspired by Denver, a fictional character from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. These paintings offer narrative spaces conducive to reflection and repose for the protagonists. By transposing literary references into the pictorial field, the artist explores the impact of fiction on the construction of reality. Through dream fragments, literary narrative mingles with the artist’s sociological imagination, multiplying representations of Denver to encourage introspective reflection and empathetic connection.
Although they can be looked at as (very) loose illustrations of the source material, this would not amount to much, carrying little of the novel’s sense of the gothic, its magic realist tendencies, and its general poeticized fetidness. The question of illustration and interpretation is not really examined in the way the works have been exhibited and would likely not be evident from the works themselves if it was not given such a textual framing. Whatever role such inspiration may have played in the production of the images, as products it is unclear what value the referent has beyond a certain type of branding. But this does little for them as paintings, which tend to suggest catalogue spreads more than their source material.
The figures in the work come off quite bland. At most, they seem like slightly cross-eyed mannequins. The lack of much more than a masked presence with glue-on eyeballs is accentuated by their general deficiency in registering a context and their functional posing. Even when, in one of the most overtly sentimentalizing figurative displays, a badly rendered frog leaps by one, it seems almost inert. It is this barely vital quality that provides one of the primary poles for the curious energy in the paintings.
What the acrylic on wood paintings do accomplish is something that does not really conjure anything the above curatorial statement suggests and which is, I think, a great deal more interesting. Where they succeed, often strikingly and with unique effect, is in terms of the use of décor and the rendering of the non-human contents of the imagery. Both of these aspects so far out-shadow the rest that the figures just come off as props, a point that would go far to explain their resemblance to mannequins, but which seems to have been unintended. It is this reversal of the hierarchy of figures that functions as the other pole to the works and provides them what force they have, a force that obscures or erases almost everything the curatorial framing attempts to direct them toward.
Cindy Dumais’ KEEP IN TOUCH Entretiens: deuxième chapitre at Circa is part of an ongoing project
…Entretiens which first began in 2017. In these projects, Cindy Dumais explores the transition from writing to the materiality of visual art through drafts of literary works donated by their authors. Here, the origin of the play The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi (1995) is referenced in two notebook pages dating from 1992, generously shared by Larry Tremblay. These serve as the starting point for a sculptural and videographic body of work where Dumais borrows from the performative potential of dramatic text to explore the theme of identity.
In this iteration, the focus brings together theatrical aspects with video and soft sculpture as “[v]arious elements of dramaturgical language are transposed into the realm of visual arts, notably the dramatization of a crescendo narrative and the evocative power of forms and materials.” Uniform-like dresses extend across the space, busts set on their trains. Two sculptures reminiscent of the kind of biomorphic abstractions of surrealism sit to one side, one spread out on the floor and the other standing, a row of teeth and gums rimming its velvet surface. On one wall is a photocopy blow-up of text and a book by DiDi-Huberman set open and face down on a pile of pinkish matter. Running along the back are velvet theatre curtains that house a small video installation of the performances. Dotting the walls at intervals are textural fragments from scripts with notes.
The writing extracts function like photographed mental processes, transient brainscans on the re-processing of the work. The text blow-ups work more like footnotes. Both of these aspects are used very sparingly and their starkness is effective. The video aspect, isolated like a changing room, takes on a performative function in the same way as the various elements used in it (costumes, wigs, and props), all of which stress the object over the presence of the performer, and the almost indifferent function of the viewer in the manufacturing of presentation. Despite its references to L’informe and the abject, there is a general smoothness to it all. Even in its overt “strangeness,” the moves are too familiar to register that way. A victim of being too pleasant, it does not really offer the “repulsion” that the text promises and the overt deconstruction of the theatrical aspects decontaminates them.
Both shows foregrounded the extent to which a character is only an element in a narrative, perhaps not even its primary actor. Both tend to move away from the foregrounding of the specifically human to something looser with which they may be bundled. It is never a sense of these aspects being things per se; they inevitably register as images with an atmosphere that is mostly self-contained, regardless of their place in a catalogue of other images. In both cases, this is done while creating an atmosphere that trivializes the affective dimension that they claim to be seeking.
One is interpretation that works primarily by suggestion and translation and the other by collection and curation. As with so much of the other art being shown lately, in both cases there is an overwhelming prop quality and an attempt to give a prop a kind of enchanted dimension that renders the human presence a secondary or supplemental part. Adaptation is the process of displacement from the ostensible subject to a form of objectification that departs from the strictness of narrative capture.
*1st and 3rd photos mine.