Earth + Sky
June 9 - July 9, 2005
Alain Lefort and Nicole Jean Hill

Alain Lefort, Fissure #2

Earth and Sky
Sylvain Campeau

Nicole Jean Hill’s Mounds and Alain Lefort’s De l’éternel azur la sereine ironie . . . are two series that depict earth and sky in similar ways but have very different objectives. To begin with, it is startling how each series turns around a minimal representation of a sober and uniform referent, one that is clearly identifiable in the former and difficult to identify in the case of the latter.

Nicole Jean Hill’s colour photographs show us images of hillocks, the mounds in the centre of a baseball diamond where the pitcher holds sway. Hung as a grid, it represents a veritable typology of mounds. Forming a clear picture of Alain Lefort’s work is more difficult. Grey, granular surfaces spread out over the photographic paper as if it had been under- or over-exposed. These surfaces, in fact, are skies, taken from the ground directly below, but they are skies with a texture that is impossible to grasp and whose details are absent and invisible, drowned as they are, overcome and submerged, by the very photographic material that permeates and reproduces them. Apart from the subject, these two bodies of work contrast in other ways. In Lefort’s work, no clear demarcation is visible. We have before us an endless surface, an unfathomable sky, the incommensurability of space on a surface with the appearance of an engraving. Hanging within and over this surface is a quantity of sky which overflows it in every direction. In Hill’s work, on the contrary, the perimeter is never far off. We sense more than we distinguish the traced lines, the playing field, the respective positions. Everything suggests that this field will be occupied, that the players will spread out in an order yet to be seen, that the stage has been set for this choreographed pantomime. In each case, these peculiar aspects emerge from an abuse of the materiality of the medium and from the texture of the grain, on the one hand of the earth and on the other of the sky.

Selecting the sky as the subject of a photograph is obviously not an innocent choice. In the first place, there is the fact that the sky takes the measure of infinity. It is the bottomless subject par excellence, the site of the excess of every dimension. To pit oneself against this boundless totality is to come face to face with the unrepresentable. What is more, the photographer has used an old Polaroid camera, allowing him to manipulate the instantaneous emulsion in such a way that dross, dust, and stray light have corroded the emulsion’s appearance. It is as if the bottomlessness of the sky has been merged with the flat silver material coated onto the paper. Here, the seeming immateriality of the air is given density, is depicted in and compressed into a material that reacts to light, born along by what it is struggling to represent.

Nor is it innocent to work with a referent such as this when one is familiar with Alfred Stieglitz’s series Equivalences and when one knows what is at stake in that series. Philippe Dubois has effectively demonstrated how this series of images sought to create a portrait of photography itself. In Stieglitz’s clouds, true concentrations of aura, in his traces of sky, a corpuscular substance without shape or body, photography becomes its own representative process and depicts its own constitutive method. But the famous Stieglitz was able to create these "self-portraits of photography by itself" thanks to the outlines of the clouds, by showing how their ethereal shapes are projected onto the celestial expanse, enabling this expanse to act as a background and to reveal these arabesque impressions of the photographic act.2 This is clearly not true of the work of Alain Lefort, in which no gaseous matter affixes its signature. And without this fundamental indication, which gives the firmament all its depth, the expanse can no longer be clearly distinguished and almost smothers the image. This indistinguishability of the sky is an aspect we can not ignore, given that the sky is the very source of the light that descends upon us.

Nicole Jean Hill, Mound I

Nicole Jean Hill’s work is entirely different from Alain Lefort’s. Each, of course, suggests a certain overflowing of the medium, because each is attracted to a sole, well-identified and rather monochrome referent. But while Lefort’s black-and-white images open onto the breach in an ethereal subject, Hill’s images in earth tones show a protuberance on the ground, a rise made to practise a leisure activity. These hillocks are the mounds upon which an athlete prepares a movement that will set the game in motion. These, then, are places where activities occur, places of waiting as well as places where the game begins. Here, the demarcations of a defined space, laid out for a precise purpose, contrast with the "bottomless," the absence of detail, and the submersion of detail in the gaseous infinity in the work of Lefort. Here too, the narrow scope of the image corresponds to just one section of the baseball field. Hill has chosen the central element of that space, around which the diamond creates its playful and regulated qualities. Footprints are added to the mix to show clearly that this is a place that is used and walked upon, that it takes its full meaning only in the fact that it must be occupied, trampled upon in a sense. In short, it is a functional space, which we observe methodically through the eye of the camera in an attempt to grasp both what it is in it that announces what will take place there and what there may be about it beyond this precise function. Because, finally, here it is shown idle, as if it were lying fallow, waiting for what gives it its raison d’être: the game. Nothing is happening here yet, nothing that could give meaning to its existence or make sense of its peculiar arrangement.
From Lefort to Hill (oh, what a fortuitous name!), from the blue sky to the almost red earth, there is a shared concern, a shared, almost self-referential effort to render the medium material and to subject this materiality to artistic intent. But what is fundamentally different about them is what is at play in each of them: the fine gauze covering a sky without defined borders, and a site waiting to be put to use.

1. Roughly translated as, "From the eternal azure, serene irony . . .," this title is inspired by a poem entitled "azur," by Stéphane Mallarmé.
2. Philippe Dubois, L’Acte photographique (Paris/Brussels: Fernand Nathan/Éditions Labor, 1983), p. 190.

Since completing his studies at Concordia University, Montreal (1995), Alain Lefort's art practice has explored relationships between the photographic medium and cultural ideas around landscape. His work is in the collection of Cirque du Soleil, the Musée du Québec’s art rental gallery, and various private collections. In 2003, he was the recipient of an Ilford Canada grant for the production of a box work entitled 182 Soleils. In 2002, he received a research and production grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and in 2000 he was awarded a short term grant. He has had several group and solo shows in Canada and abroad. An earlier version of De l’éternel azur la sereine ironie… was presented at The Floating Gallery, Centre for Photography, Winnipeg in 2002. He lives and works in Montreal.

Nicole Jean Hill studied photography at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the University of North Carolina. Her photography and video work has been widely exhibited throughout the U.S. and Canada. She is the co-organizer of two traveling exhibitions currently touring various cities across North America. The first, entitled Busted is a digital video collection of do-it-yourself, low-fi short videos (seven minutes and under), and the second, Bunker, deals with printmaking and photography. She currently teaches photography at the Metropolitan Community College in Elkhorn, Nebraska.

Sylvain Campeau holds a Ph.D. in French Literature. He has been published in such Canadian and European magazines as ETC Montréal, CV Photo, Parachute, PhotoVision and Papel Alpha. He has also curated some thirty exhibitions, presented in Canada and abroad, including Monuments du funambule, a solo exhibition of Jocelyne Alloucherie's work. Also a poet, he has published four collections of poems, one essay on photography entitled Chambres obscures. Photographie et installation (Trois, 1995) and an anthology of Québec poetry.