PORCELAINE - CARTE GRISE À EVERGON
Jennifer Campbell, Léopold L. Foulem, Eduardo Ralickas, Mackenzie Stroh + Evergon
Opening on Thursday, April 17 at 5 p.m.
The exhibition runs from April 17 to May 24, 2003.
A bilingual publication accompanies the exhibition.
Transfiguration. To transform a thing’s outward appearance by endowing it with a smashing and glorious outline of feature. To transmute by bestowing an unusual beaut of figure. For an aesthetics of transfiguration.
Eduardo Ralickas, Transfiguration No. 1 (Porcelain Fragments).
Each year, Carte grise makes it possible to discover a particular artist’s vision of contemporary photography, by way of an exhibition and a publication. As part of this program, Evergon presents us with Porcelaine, an exhibition of work by Jennifer Campbell, Léopold L. Foulem, Eduardo Ralickas and Mackenzie Stroh, as well as some work of his own.
With Porcelaine, Evergon lingers on the surface of things, on the work of appearances, and on the often fragile and sometimes permeable boundaries which delimit space and objects, circumscribe beings, and protect against fragmentation. From the photographic emulsion to the glaze used in ceramics and porcelain, and to our own skin, Evergon presents us with a reading of photography that thwarts its supposed transparency and brings into play transformation, indeed permutation and even transfiguration.
Léopold L. Foulem’s ceramics set themselves up as unbridled collages, juxtaposing motifs and shapes in an anachronistic manner. What Foulem deploys in his work is the range of appearances and allurement, and also of kitsch - a perfect working of the surfaces that this Carte grise reflects upon. Evergon’s own work, although it too borrows from this idea of recontextualising motifs and juxtaposing incongruous images, offers us the underside of the smooth surface of the glaze. The paint is peeling on his photographed figurines and the body of Margaret (the artist’s mother) bears the traces of time. Nevertheless, the uniform lustre of the photographic epidermis resists. The glossy quality of the photographic paper also reinforces Mackenzie Stroh’s strange self-portraits, whose vitrified quality is enhanced by great care for that other epidermis, the surface of the face. Petrified and yet fragile - both psychologically and physically - the various personalities Stroh incarnates - ransfigures - raise questions about identity and the perception of the self by pastiching and subverting the world of advertising. Jennifer Campbell is also present in her work, not as a subject/object but rather as a performing body. She makes her body into a surface, a territory where banal and everyday objects strangely gain a firm hold. Campbell’s colourful compositions give rise to unusual transformations and permutations. It is around this notion of permutation that the visual and textual work of Eduardo Ralickas also turns. By attempting to arrest, through the image and words, the lightning-like fall and breaking of a fragile object, Ralickas examines the interchangeable translations by means of which language attempts to express the photograph and in which sensations seek to usurp thought. And yet, what is attempted to be expressed in words and what is revealed exist only on the surface of an image.