Reviews: Judith Bellavance at Galerie DÈS; Embodied at Atelier 531; Pierre-Olivier Déry at Elektra; and Herman Kolgen at Art Mûr
This time around, I highlight a set of interrelated concerns in four seemingly disparate exhibitions.
Part of the Post-Invisibles Biennale, Histoires de disparition by Judith Bellavance was at Galerie DÈS. The exhibition involved a series of approximately life-sized photos of clothing that once belonged to the departed. Not as austere as mourning or typical funereal display garments, they were everyday or nightwear, which added to their diaphanous quality and the muted sense of illumination their production treatment infused them with. These were displayed hanging horizontally in the middle of the gallery space, suspended in clusters. Images were set back-to-back, and their presentational hanging doubled the image of the clothes hanging.
Bellavance framed it all as a counterpart to her work as an embalmer:
To engage with my creative themes of loss and disappearance, I have been working in the funeral sector since 2019. This proximity constantly heightens my awareness of the rituals reserved for the deceased and their posthumous fate. I experience this professional journey as a great voyage where I encounter various quests to give meaning to this ultimate experience of disappearance. At times, I witness the desire of some bereaved to transform physical absence into an invisible presence. The uninhabited body dematerialises and transforms like a sort of chrysalis before unfolding into the immateriality of thought. This allows one to retain, observe and feel the presence of the departed right to the very end, until names no longer have faces or sounds. The ultimate end of an existence might perhaps lie where memory fades.
Ironically (perhaps), what is on display is something entirely different from what she outlines above. The whole process of memory as dematerialization and invisible presence couldn’t be further away from the presentational presence that constitutes her work. In effect, what she displays is the “part” of presence, its habitation of space, and the lack of any real absence.
In respect to the “content”: There is a range of styles, levels of wear, and patterns, although they are all softened and faded. The works aren’t overwhelmed by sentimental projection. The weight of the hangers provides an interesting way of flattening the suspended garments and reminding you of their de-animation, while the inclusion of rumpled bags suggestive of sacks of garbage provides something bordering on satirical deflation. The general suggestion is that the body is less than garbage or the clothing that houses it.
It is an interesting set-up. It sort of works. I imagine if you were wandering through it alone and there had been more effort at employing theatrical lighting, it could be more effective in its aim to be evocative and ghostly. But as it was, it was in a bright white room with other people milling about in the small space and discussing it, which made it feel more like the ritual of luxury shopping.
Like fashion photography, this exhibition is also (if differently) about the aura of clothing and about how clothing possesses a presence that exceeds that of the human body. The most interesting thing about the exhibition is its stress on flattening. The body is not only deflated but seems to have been flattened into disappearance. The surfaces on which the images appear barely wrinkle or ripple. Unlike the ambiguous space created by sculptures or mannequins and their intrusions on the viewer, these renderings of clothing stress their physicality as icons of flatness. There is nothing beneath their facades but another, completely interchangeable image.
[As an aside: While I never properly worked in the funeral business, I come from a family of undertakers (and farmers). No one seems to react to embalming people the same way. Having seen people being embalmed from a young age likely coloured how I view the human body and makes it hard for me to see anything particularly “spiritual” about it. But plenty of undertakers I have met react the opposite way.]
Embodied at Atelier 531, curated by Liza Sukolovskaya and Kara Eckler, is also part of the Post-Invisibles Biennale. It includes six artists (the curators and Hannaleah Ledwell, Heather Euloth, Lea Elise, and Madeline Richards) working in the province in different media. They are an interesting mix, some of them dealing with the basic thematic (“What I Carry”) a little too literally (deliberately or not). The framing repeats the presence/absence or body/soul dichotomy of the Bellavance exhibition:
…the pieces explore the physicality of the body and the myriad experiences associated with embodiment. Some works are luminous, vibrant, full of colour and energy; others carry a sense of real or symbolic weight – suspended masses, knotted forms, trailing elements – evoking burden, tension and resistance. [p] For we all carry a body: its gravity, its memory, its transformations. The artists address the realities of the female experience – invisible labour, social expectations, physical changes, patriarchal legacies – whilst affirming the persistence of desire, creativity and hope. Embodied thus offers a space where individual experiences converge. Whilst women do not form a homogeneous bloc, certain resonances run through their journeys.
The body is dealt with in both direct and indirect terms. It can be presented as the textile garment that clothes the body and doubles as labour (Elise) or illustrated in more or less symbolic and ritualistic poses. Or it can be playfully alluded to, as in Euloth’s assemblages, which suggest both biological aspects and their technical extensions, fused as decorative toys. If Bellavance’s exhibition was largely about the lightness that exceeds the body, Embodied is mostly about the body’s weight.
The works are in a variety of sizes, but most are fairly compact. They curve around the green entrance space and into the studio. Generally, their positioning works nicely, and they bring out one another’s colours and textures well. The studio setting also provides the work with a more “lived-in” atmosphere that seems appropriate. Stylistically, with the exceptions of the textile and sculptural works, there is an interesting tendency toward expressionism.
Thematically, they are consistent, generally concentrating on the body in the form of nudes, albeit nudes closer to the traditions of erotic art rather than academic study. In the case of Sukolovskaya, this is an exaggerated sort of iconographic nude, where the almost linear treatment of the body contrasts with the details of patterns. In the case of Richards’ oil paintings, the figures are flattened and abstracted even further, almost to the point that the colour sometimes seems like staining. This goes some way to making the images gel into something verging on hallucinatory.
Other work I have seen by Eckler has tended to be larger, more loosely narrative, and even slightly melodramatic in its compositions, which tend to employ distorted perspective. That is less evident here. Instead, there’s a more bare style of composition. The strain comes from the isolated figure in-itself rather than its relationship to an implied plot. This also makes it a little more abstracted in composition (it is dominated by the tensions she’s creating with curves playing against shallow observational detail), but also makes the bodies register more concretely as headless surfaces of fleshy expression.
Something similar is at play in paintings by Ledwell. The larger paintings rely on an attractive, restricted palette, but come off symbolically heavy-handed, and the relation between the chromatic limit and the organization of space seems sketchy. However, the small works she exhibits are energetic and condensed, more suggestive than illustrative. As with Eckler, working on a smaller scale seems to intensify the stronger aspects of her painting and gives the treatment of weight a more impressive quality.
These two exhibitions from the Biennale can be usefully complemented by two current exhibitions outside of its ambit. The first, Carcasse XR by Pierre-Olivier Déry at Elektra, is also primarily an exhibition dealing with weight and the playful interchange between the organic and industrial. If, in Euloth, this interchange was worked out in loosely “fetishistic” (in the anthropological sense of the term) visual terms, in Déry it is something closer to satire, with its inversions of expectations and plays on codes.
At the centre of Elektra’s exhibition space is the chassis and various other elements of a 2004 Toyota Matrix, piled up, reflective, and compact. Fluids of various colours are suspended and circulate within it, suggesting both a medical intervention and the model of a circulatory system. The weightiness of the pile helps to give it its bodily quality. The idea of the automobile as an extension and autonomizing outgrowth of the human body is made obvious here. This is staged in two simultaneous ways. One, as a remnant among remnants: a wall is stacked high with tires that serve as both an elaborate kind of relief “wallpaper” (complete with hanging images) and a display “setting” suggestive of a junkyard. At the other wall is a densely set pile of reeds that blur any distinction between nature and artefact, casting both as invasive species.
All of this is glossed in the following way:
The composition assembles a chassis and fragments of bodywork with a system of pumps containing colored liquids, evoking a wrecked vehicle kept alive. In response to this machinery is the presence of common reed, an invasive exotic species. Found in southern Quebec along the Trans-Canada Highway, its proliferation has been favored by wet ditches and winds channeled through asphalt corridors. This parallel invites us to consider the car as a living, invasive system—on par with this plant, which inadvertently benefits from and contributes to the transformation of landscapes.
This final point hints at one of the most interesting formal aspects of the work. Clearly, the installation functions as a set that can be toured. It exploits aspects of the landscape genre, especially the tradition of the symbolic nude in a landscape, and filters this through the display aesthetics of design showrooms. You get a little of the outside cropped and brought inside, and you get the collapsed interior/exterior of the automobile that becomes its own body in the process, rather than merely the housing of a body. This dramatizes the accession to bodily autonomy as the becoming of a display object, a point that seems suggested by the presentation of tires as wall hangings and the suspension of videos on the tires that are reminiscent of the quasi-abstract videos used in some model homes.
If the Bellavanace exhibition operated as a counterpart to funeral home aesthetic practices, and Embodied offered cropped bodies as expressionist aspects of architecture, the Déry installation explored the display logic of embodiment in an even more rigorous and slightly comical vein. The final exhibition I will discuss looks at it more austerely, but also with off-kilter results.
Herman Kolgen's La part de nous at Art Mûr is an elaborate, multi-part exhibition spanning two floors, each aspect of which explores elements of its general thematic by different means. I won’t discuss the entire thing, but only two of the aspects relevant to the issues raised so far.
The section Matières intime (2024) emphasizes clothing as a second skin and architectural element. The artist has collected clothes, effectively fossilized, and then suspended them. Texts are superimposed on them to give them a more “personal” quality, but this largely detracts from the range of significance that the Bellavanace show managed to create through its preservation processes.
The more interesting section of the Kolgen exhibition, Autour de son nombril (2025), concentrates its attention on the navel, cast here as the “original anchor point before speech and before breath.” To one side is a blown-up photo of a navel, exposed in full detail, and lit from behind. To the other is the recording of a “sound resonance” of the area, played through a large speaker. The speaker echoes the shape of the navel. Both aspects retain the stark black and white that dominates the majority of the work in the exhibition. While it could be read as a joke about navel-gazing, it seems pretty humourless.
Basically, it involves two different ways of capturing a scar: one with photography, one with sound. The two senses, separated, abstracted beyond the unaided perceptual capacities of the human body, are essentially cross-coded as machine perception and then fit down around a human head so that the dehumanization of perception can be perceived. It does this without becoming too gimmicky, and comes much closer to conjuring the sort of “presence” that Bellavance alluded to in framing but didn’t really do in practice. The difference is that the presence is clearly that of the sensual impressions made on machine memory rather than human memory. Kolgen effectively theatricalizes artefactual presentation as the supplementation of bodily perception.