Programming
Sophie Jodoin and Susie Acheson
Natures mortes en sept tableaux & Le corps-fantôme
An installation of paintings and photography.
The formation of a series of works (drawing, photography, wall compositions) aimed at stopping time and making permanent what I know to be transitory, prompts reflection on mortality, beauty and the relationship between man and nature. My work reflects my lifelong preoccupation with the passage of time and the traces it leaves in its wake. So far, I've focused on drawing figurative fragments on various surfaces (glass, waste paper and fabric) that have already "lived", so to speak. This approach is continued here, using photography as the preferred medium. These mural compositions feature various lightly veiled sequences, evoked as if through the weft of years, like islands threatened but not yet submerged. The formation of this series of works, aimed at stopping time and making permanent what I know to be irremediably transitory, prompts reflection on mortality, beauty and the relationship between man and nature. The result is a series of paintings in which various fragments and their poetic correlations are used to explore notions of shroud and luminosity, sacredness and the funereal.
Although it is literally absent, the female body transpires in these images, demonstrating the operation of the dialectic of desire and seduction, apparently impossible to avoid by the simple fact of representation. The body remains like a ghost inhabiting the dress (or the skirt, or the boot) whereas the dress assumes the role of spirit of this vanished body. Only iconic remnants of the absent body, its strengths and weaknesses, are shown: bones, threads, hooks, words, raw materials, images of these handmade objects, reproductions, photographic and computer re-representations and, of course, clothing in various forms of representation.