Exhibitions 2003

May 1 - May 31, 2003
Opening Thursday, May 1, 6 - 8 PM

Honeymoons :
The Possible Fictions of Michel de Broin + Ève K. Tremblay
By Christine Walde



Michel de Broin + Ève K. Tremblay, Honeymoon SF5 (help), 2002

One day the door is opened to the lovers chamber.
The room has become a dense garden,
Full of colours, smells, sounds you have never known.

—Leonard Cohen, You Have The Lovers

In Honeymoons, sculptor Michel de Broin and photographer Ève K. Tremblay have come together to present us with a series of possible fictions: subjects and objects carefully staged before lush dioramas of sensual intent that lure and entice. Enacted for the camera, theirs is a seductive engagement—an elopement of sorts, a kind of arranged marriage. Their vows are created out of nothing but the desire to be beholden, each in the eye of the other. Here they are found and re-found, again and again, in landscapes that serve to simultaneously displace and reconfigure them as propellant entities—both abstract and sexual. Engineered within the frame of the camera, theirs is a beguiling construction, full of fantasy and plausibility.

Honeymoons is premised upon the artists’ mutual desire to discover one another and one another’s work; to explore and uncover the exotic in the ordinary, both by revealing the space of the self and by finding where the other hides. For that is the original significance of the honeymoon: to hide for one lunar month after marriage. And so de Broin and Tremblay symbolically wed and hide: one to the other, one from the other, marrying two different art practices, in order to see what they can create together, as one. It is a game of hide and seek, a documentation of ecstasy. A series of playful portraits isolated in space and time, partnered within the peculiarities of travel.

An underlying lust for narrative is what generates the potency of this collaboration. In their individual art practices the artists have grappled with narrative issues both existentially and emotionally, respectively configuring installations and mise-en-scenes that posit realities—however dissimilar—akin to those we see in Honeymoons. On the one hand, de Broin is concerned with signs such as arrows in sculptural installations like Epater la galerie (2002), and the functionality of those object/signs made abstract. Tremblay, on the other hand, is focused upon the link between the psyche and the element of fable in such photographic series as L’Éducation sentimentale (2000) and how those complexities can be represented through portraiture. Together, they transform one another’s art by combining elements from each, determining a new sense of story and meaning in each image and in each object by the very nature of their mutual transmutation. And by choosing The Forest, The City, and The Hearth as archetypal settings for their images, they create symbolic points of departure through which they explore the invisible topography of love.

For if you look, you will see. Here and there and everywhere, they are hiding, lost, and then found, and then re-found again, one converging upon the other. His hands holding two parched branches on a barren tree. Her disheveled towel upon a soft mossy ground. Him hugging a rock. Her arm interjecting into the trees. Her head on a bed, his cock in her mouth. Him holding a strand of serpentine cable. Her arms lifted up, into the light. Each image
locates an end to a new beginning to where the other was or will be. A poetic mixture of fiction and documentation, these images reflect what is ordinary in exotic places, the body acting as a conductor to the environment it stands in, precipitating the narrative of events.

Their palette is both luscious and ominous, set within vivid landscapes littered with the wreckage of industrial objects. But it is their human presence that draws us into the images. These strange attractors inalterably shift the course of time and events, and we are the witnesses to their voyage of discovery. But they are not without playfulness. And whether it is in their post-coital repose in a cemetery—lying before a gravestone marked AMOURE—or her cupped hands under the setting sun, de Broin and Tremblay offer us private glimpses of their exploration of love in public domains, elevating the quotidian to a new level of intimacy and eroticism with both humour and irony. And because it is, after all, a honeymoon, we have the lovers: blurs of flesh entirely unrecognizable, with no ending or beginning, ecstatic with the interplay of light and colour and passion. Here, the act of love transcends the still life to become a new kind of landscape, a radical portrait that displaces both subject and object, becoming entirely abstract. Once again, their bodies act as transducers, each transforming the other.

Whether it is a diptych or a triptych, within the work’s formal arrangement there is another story being told, an interior dialogue between the images themselves that makes us consider cause and effect, each image another possible beginning, middle, or end to our honeymooners’ story. It is the precise interrelation of these works that speaks to the transparency of narrative continuity. And in the spaces between, is the myriad of possibilities of what could have happened before or after. Indeed, as de Broin and Tremblay have said, many more honeymoons are needed to continue their explorations, each new journey an occasion to lose and rediscover the other.

At last, what emerges in this collaboration between Michel de Broin and Ève K. Tremblay is a way of reading, of being "engaged" in a visual and meditative discourse with the work. It is an arousing invitation. For we, too, are a part of the picture. Standing outside of it, looking in, we are a part of the story. By our very looking, we are implicated in the construction of the work itself, accomplices of the lovers, building the narrative of each photograph in our minds, simultaneously creating both the image and the object, creating our own possible fictions.
But look for yourself. Now look again. And look once more.

Biographies:

Michel de Broin has had solo shows in Canada at Circa (1997), Skol (1999), and Pierre-Francois Ouellette A.C. (2003), and in Germany at the Villa Merkel and the Bahnwaterhaus (2002). He has received numerous awards including the Prix Pierre-Ayot (Montreal, 2002), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (New York, 1999), and the Prix Québec-Capital (1998). He has participated in international group shows such as Au courant, curated by Sarah Cook (Bard College, New York, 1998), and Tenir sans servir c’est resister at the Kunsthaus Baseland (while he was in residence in Basel, Switzerland in 2000-01). Recent Canadian group shows include Entrelacement at the Triennale Artefact (Montreal 2001) and La demeure, curated by Marie Fraser (Monteal, 2002). In June 2003, his sculpture Révolution will be inaugurated at Maisonneuve-Cartier Park in Montreal. Described as an "unclassifiable artist," de Broin pointedly transgresses artistic rules and norms. He lives and works in Montreal.

Following her studies in at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, Université de Montréal, and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, New York, Ève K. Tremblay obtained a BA in photography at Concordia University in 2000. Ève K. Tremblay has had solo shows in Montreal at Occurrence (2000), Circa (2002), and Usine C (2003), and at Oeil de Poisson in Québec (2001), Archives in Toronto (2001), and the maison de la culture Rivière-des-Prairies (2003). Her work has also been seen in several group shows in Canada. She is the recipient of grants from the Canada Arts Council and the Quebec Arts Council (residence Christoph-Mélian in Basel, Switzerland in 2003). Her work, part of several collections, has a narrative dimension and is situated at the intersection of portrait, fiction, and autobiography. She lives and works in Montreal.

Christine Walde has been published in a variety of literary magazines and art journals, including b +a, Descant, Kiss Machine, LOLA, and The New Quarterly. Gutter Press will publish her first novel, The Candy Darlings, in Fall 2003.