SOPHIE JODOIN: Close Your Eyes

June 28 to August 26, Richmond Art Gallery

By Janet Nicol

Sophie Jodoin is a Montreal-based artist who aims to create a subtle sense of discomfort for the viewer with her black and white drawings. “The title is a contradiction,” she says. “Someone is telling you to close your eyes, but you can’t close your eyes.” Each of the drawings is small and intimate in scale, but they’re countered with a series of five larger drawings of burned houses. “This is where these stories take place,” Jodoin says. It’s as if the smaller drawings show the aftermath of the events in the burning houses. In the first room of the exhibition, 90 drawings which Jodoin describes as a collection of narratives, line the walls, and a multimedia work echoes the stories in the drawings. In an adjacent gallery, a table holds a collection of objects she describes as the “remnants” and “debris” of our lives. Jodoin’s work is notable for the strange nature of its storytelling, and her distinctive drawing style, with highly detailed portraits mixed with drawings that look more like collage. But the narrative of the whole in all her series, some of which can take up to two years to materialize, is as important as the effects of each individual work. Storylines are reflected in the gallery itself. “The rooms are chambers of our lives connected through time,” she says. “I leave it to the viewer to forge a relationship with the stories.”