Janet Werner: Drop, drop slow tears
Jordan Weitzman: Uncertain Smile
January 15–February 14, 2015
Parisian Laundry
3550 St-Antoine West
Montreal (Quebec)
Canada, H4C 1A9
www.parisianlaundry.com
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In Drop, drop slow tears, Janet Werner’s fourth solo exhibition at Parisian Laundry, the artist continues her ongoing consideration of representation, subjectivity and desire. In painting fictionalized portraits, often from fashion editorials, the artist disassociates her protagonists twice over. Not only are Werner’s subjects removed from feminized ideals, the notion of the ideal itself is fragmented and further revealed as artifice in the act of painting. Thus, the conventions of beauty characteristic of idealized images become complicated, taking on forms verging on the grotesque, the humorous and the ludicrous.
Werner’s body of work draws from a wealth of sources, including contemporary popular culture, fashion photography, film, social media and historical painting. In amalgamating disparate reference points, her paintings bring conventional notions of portraiture under scrutiny. These works are portraits in the most fundamental sense, as representations of bodies and domains of subjectivity, most often female. As composites however, the images preclude the very prospect of a consolidated identity. Werner’s art is less didactic than ambivalent. She is not so much criticizing the consumption of images and entrenching of ideals, but proposing such consumption as an inevitable condition of subjectivity in our current social order.
As such, the ideal that is circulated and striven towards is brought back to the level of flesh. There is an air of isolated existential contemplation to the women Werner paints. Like the model, they seem to trade in their bodies and identities for a void, becoming screens for the projections and desires of others. This emptiness is not employed pejoratively, but is suggested as necessary and constitutive. Werner’s paintings have been exhibited widely throughout Canada as well as internationally. Her artworks are part of numerous public and private collections. Beginning in 2013, the artist was the focus of the travelling exhibition, Another Perfect Day, which was accompanied by a publication of the same name.
At the heart of Uncertain Smile, photographer Jordan Weitzman’s new exhibition at Parisian Laundry, is the portrait. Portraiture generally promises a gateway into the soul of the sitter, a personal encounter with and mediated through the image. Such a promise however, is suspect. How can what is seen on the surface necessarily guarantee that which is sought after and beyond? Through techniques such as obscuring, doubling, slicing and splitting, these photographs amplify this bankruptcy of the portrait while stimulating the desire for knowledge and immersion.
Weitzman’s practice is essentially characterized by an interchangeable sense of intimacy between photographer, photographed subject and viewer. That being said, there is most certainly an air of the uncanny clinging throughout the various scenes he images. Personas seem fragmented, settings are made strange and narrative is equivocal. A viewer may be pulled in, but little is revealed and the experience of intimacy is thus itself perverted.
In Uncertain Smile such perversion is most clearly articulated in a disjunction between voyeurism and exhibitionism. Various subjects (mostly young men) perform identities to be viewed. However, it is left ambiguous who in fact is meant to be looking and whether or not viewership actually transgresses privacy. In this way, Uncertain Smile picks up on the unfixable politics involved in the desire to be seen, known and identified as well as in seeing, knowing and naming.
Coming up this spring:
We are very pleased to announce that we are now representing Carlos and Jason Sanchez.
14 January–14 February
Tedeschi Collection: New acquisitions on display in gallery two, featuring works by Shannon Bool, Eva Kotakova, Alicja Kwade and Amanda Ross-Ho
25 February–14 March
Collision 11
