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511 GALLERY is honored to open its second season with Monuments, the new photographs and sculptures of Montréal artist Jocelyne Alloucherie.
Alloucherie, who was awarded the 2002 Paul-Émile-Borduas Prize - the highest distinction given by the Government of Québec in the field of the visual arts - creates sculptures, photographs, and installation pieces combining photographs with sculptures. In their essence, her works refer to landscape and site.
New giant inkjet photographs of SoHo roofscapes captured at dawn become haunting icons of a memorialized place. Set into large thick gesso three-quarter frames, with the top edge left deliberately unconfined, these works allow the image of the sky above the rooftops to escape into an unknown upper register. These photographs were made from July, 2002 - January 2003, when Alloucherie was artist-in-residence at the Studio du Québec in New York.
The exhibition also includes five sculptural objects, two of them large geometric oblongs or cubed, white gessoed forms, each draped with nylon material onto which a photograph of branches has been printed. The thin, bunched or flat cloth seems like a layer of skin, contrasting in visual and tactile sensibility with the stark, minimalist form of the object underneath. The objects and the cloths each seem to occupy spaces of their own while intimately connected to their bases of support.
Four large photographs of the shadows of tree branches -- again, framed in white gesso carapaces -- refer the viewer to the relationship between site (the landscape) and non-site (the object made for presentation in the gallery), while constantly holding to the standard of continuity and an almost limitless range of possibilities between the two objects, the photograph and the frame. Though sometimes called a Minimalist artist, Alloucherie dispels the label by her insistent demonstration that the work refers to much more than simply itself.
The final work in the show, Monuments, takes a viewer beyond what is presented: two high, white, gesso vertical pieces whose bases seem to have once been linked. The reference may be to that which is monumental, through its grand, stark scale, but it may simultaneously be to that which memorializes or "warns against" the grand and perhaps arrogant object in the landscape. Alloucherie's photographs remind us of the photograph as memory; while the objects recall the human instinct for making memorials.
