Textes 

• Tammer El-Sheikh, Selected Sections from “Trespass: From Pictured Space to Public Place”Compression, Concordia University MFA Studio Arts, ed. Sol Nagar (Montreal: Concordia/Art Mur, 2007), 2007.(eng)In the work of Susi Brister, David Spriggs, Christophe Jivraj and Véronique Malo, the Modernist pretence of purity, in its photographic mode especially, is exposed and exploded. Through Brister’s meditations on the impossibility of representational neutrality, and Spriggs’s architectural reconstruction of the medium as a (dubious) technology of cultural memory, a fine line appears between the photograph’s indexical power and its ‘truth-telling’ capacity. In Jivraj’s and Malo’s works this fine line is displaced onto a vast field of social relations, coded in public space and sustained by intimate encounters, both innocent and controversial.Véronique Malo’s work La fiancée (2006) returns us once more to the winter landscape in Montreal for a lighter but equally insightful mode of social play. The video was recorded in the sprawling and anonymous Parc La Fontaine, all the more anonymous in its snow-covered state, save for a couple featured on a bench at the centre of the shot locked in a perpetual near-embrace. Behind the couple cars pass by on the street; the only (perceptible) movement in the piece, which creates an odd effect of projecting the background forward. This distortion is compounded by the motionless position of Malo’s subjects. Though they are seen from a distance, a tangle of (mis)communications is visible. The male sitter’s hand reaches out toward the female sitter’s breast, but their gazes remain out of alignment both with each other, and with Malo’s observational eye. The scene suspends an awkward encounter that Malo offers for the viewer’s imaginative unfolding or continuation in any number of directions, from the menacing or paranoid to the charming and utopian.The video develops the protocol used for Two Strangers Kissing (2006), by which acquaintances of the artist, unknown to each other, are positioned in a public space and asked to kiss while Malo records the interaction. But while the couple in Two Strangers Kissing animate their exchange with chuckling and whispered offerings, La fiancée has the appearance of an awkwardly timed photographic portrait, exiled in a video recording. This collision of media refers the viewer to a stop-animation project entitled McKay (2006), in which Malo constructs a picture of the information-aged, anonymous flow of sidewalk traffic by charmingly lo-tech means.Malo’s crafty layering of media represents an equally layered conception of public space; a space variously probed for photographic conditions, historical re-memory, value-laden codes of viewing and suspended moments of intimate possibility by these four gifted artists.
• Mike Rattray on The Social Club : Le club social, 2007 (eng)On one wall of the gallery, you hear it, just to your right. You walk in and it’s there, something recognizable, but you cannot quite place it. There are sounds coming from the headphones just to your right, the lull hush of it comes to you suddenly: fans. Screaming, whistles, claps, a fury of auditory detritus… yes, you remember this, something akin to a memory… there it is, I’m with my dad…. we’re at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, and it’s my first real live hockey game experience. It is a memory I haven’t recalled in years, but stepping into Veronique Malo’s “Le club social : The Social Club” brings the memory back full-force, it’s an admittedly surprising reaction.Fifteen images adorn the gallery walls, all at five by five inches each. Three benches occupy the floor space, each one thirteen by fifty-five inches. One screen for projection at thirteen by thirteen inches starts to make me wonder whether the artist is working with numerology, or whether I am someone who thinks things too far. Either way, there is something comforting to the space with these noises and these set numerical values.The piece is broken into fragments. Each of the images represent a fragment of the whole, which is a looped projection of a bench clearing hockey fight between the Montréal Canadians and the Québec Nordiques from nineteen eighty four. The images, pixilated through magnification, take on an abstracted tone where if a spectator were left without the projection and listening station, it would be difficult to discern what the images represented. Through fragmentation, the artist comments on an act of perception, or the piecing together of images and sound to create the mental image of reality, itself an entirely subjective phenomena.”Le club social…” required the spectator to look closely, or closer than what most are accustomed to in a world marked by the thirty to forty-five second attention span abided by through marketing theory. By sitting and watching the piece, one could realize the subtle details being invoked by the images surrounding the projection. The projected video -itself a fragment of a larger whole that remained hidden from view- could easily be dismissed as an exact copy of an original instance, but if one were to take the time to inspect the occurrences, they would have quickly realized the slight distortions, manipulations and edits occurring within. Scenes repeated themselves, certain movements reversed and played again, frames were removed, and slight breaks occurring in the temporal narrative of succession exemplified how quickly expectation can turn to complacency. What is assumed as a fight can become something else, something closer to a dance or social gathering, something along the lines of a misunderstanding, where only the players recognize what is really happening, while everybody else watches and contrives an opinion.
• Article de Paul Ruban, La liberté le 7 juillet 2010 (fr)
• Entrevue avec Dominique Reynolds pour Radio-réveil, Radio-Canada, 5 juillet 2010 (fr)