L'Occupation des sols is a text by the French writer Jean Echenoz, as well as the title of an ongoing project initiated by Jonathan Demers at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau, just across the river from Ottawa. (It will also be one of his last initiatives there as Director, as he was recently nominated to the same position at the Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides.) In the spirit of open-ended experimentation and artistic research promoted at the gallery, Demers invited a number of artists to respond to Echenoz's text and to the site itself. Josée Dubeau is the first artist to participate in a project that, ultimately, stages the act of reading, implicating each reader, both artists and viewers, in a performance that gives body to the meaning of the text.
Josée Dubeau, L'Occupation des sols (outside view), 2014, wall drawing in non-photo blue pencil
The site of the installation is visible from the street outside: four large windowpanes open onto a gallery that, apart from a simple table and chair, appears empty. That impression is not changed greatly when you gain access to the inside, until you adjust to your surroundings and notice a web of faint blue lines that crisscross the walls and obliquely skew the structure of the room and its perspectival space. Resting on the table is a copy of Echenoz's text, published by Les Éditions de minuit, its short length inviting a reading in one sitting, in full view of passersby.
Dubeau's intervention offers a sensitive and economical reading of the text, matching both its emotional weight and its slightness of form. In Echenoz's tale, the last remaining image of Sylvie Fabre, deceased, is on a mural advertising perfume on the side of a building. Her widower and her son habitually visit the site to see her, until a new building in the adjacent lot goes up and, as it is constructed floor by floor, gradually covers the mural on which she appears. Dubeau has drawn her design directly on the wall in non-photo blue pencil, evoking not only the colour of the dress that Sylvie was wearing, but also her disappearance. A further disappearance is effected by the displacement of Dubeau's customary practice of geometric wooden sculptures by a more Platonic schema that sketches in the space's potential, even as the faint lines break against the uneven surface of the walls.
I was surprised to think that the readers/actors in this project are actually in a position that parallels the antagonists of Echenoz's text, with each new construction running the risk of scuttling the last. Diane Génier is scheduled to be the next artist, and, in light of recent work in which she burned sections of her drawings, who knows? She might set fire to the place.
AXENÉO7: http://www.axeneo7.qc.ca/
L'Occupation des sols continues until June 21.
Michael Davidge is an artist, writer, and independent curator who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Border Crossings, BlackFlash, and C Magazine, among other publications. He is Akimblog's Ottawa correspondent and can be followed on Twitter @MichaelDavidge.
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Josee Debeau at AXENEO7 in Ottawa
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