Valérie Blass | When I feel shy

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Valérie Blass, “When I feel shy,” 2024

installation view (courtesy of the Gallery)

The gallery walls offer little in the way of camouflage. In fact, those who traverse this environment rarely seek to blend into the overbright expanse—beings and objects alike are set in high relief against the monochromatic backdrop. But for those who feel shy, other forms of concealment are necessary. The work of Valérie Blass and Sonya Kelliher-Combs exists within this tension of visibility, signification, and dissimulation. Both artists use forms of crypsis to confuse and reconsider an object’s surface—downplaying the familiar and amplifying the overlooked. In faint lettering, Blass’ work scrawls, Les non dits le silence désigne une forme parce qu’on peut voir la forme du silence. (‘Things unsaid in silence point to a form because you can see the shape of silence.’)

Like the snowy tundra, the white cube is largely devoid of foliage or other obstructions that could disguise a hulking silhouette. Creatures like the Alaska moose, who roam the subarctic, therefore do not rely on countershading or mimetic colouration to ward off predators. Moose fur is dense and dark except for grey, stocking-like marks where their legs meet the snowpack. In remnant, Kelliher-Combs ensconces five moose feet within white frames, almost as if viewed from beneath the ice. What is dissimulated here is not the moose, but the skin-like membrane against which the dewclaws strain. Taut as a drum, yet struck from behind, these skins are embedded with moose and caribou fur, ink, paint, and threaded quills. The surfaces could be hides or tanned garments if they did not possess the translucency of shrink-wrap. Are the moose leggings preserved, or are they trapped? Are we to read a dichotomy of nature and culture, the animal held back from the human world by a veil of our own making? That the moose is present only as skin, held within a kind of skin, suggests a more complicated nesting of organisms—the bounds of the body as physical self extend within and without these rectilinear shapes.

Where the works in Kelliher-Combs’ remnant protrude against the membranes of their walls, Blass’ work recedes back into them. Household objects—an oil bottle, a cabinet door, frames, and vases—are nearly swallowed by form-fitting alcoves. It is as if the house, as one of the many skins we wear, subsumed the belongings within. But a closer look reveals that these objects are, already, only their outermost layer of self: the interior of the barbecue briquettes bag is inlaid with copper, the cabinet lacks a carcass, and the vase is sealed shut.

When I feel shy contains many such objects. In Blass’ hands, they tend towards viscosity—their solidity uncertain as they slouch around the room. Separate links in a chain blur into each other. Lacking distinction from the whole and its parts, each are images camouflaged as objects. The use of fimo clay compounds this sensation—its colours run deep, not merely decorating the surface with patterns and linework, but flowing through the object. Hammers, amongst other tools, are rearranged to become portrait busts. Lacking bodies, we can only infer the missing limbs based on the shapes of an elongated bottle, an oversized candle holder, or a stiffened belt.

Like the solitary moose joined by a fifth foot, these shy and absent bodies suggest that camouflage here is not about deception but revelation. When we say ‘there is more than meets the eye,’ we imply that the eye must strain harder, looking for the forensic traces of time, labour, and meaning that inevitably accumulate on a surface. Yet, as these assemblages reveal, the surface is never singular—it’s always layered, nested within other membranes and bodies. The patient eye meets itself if it looks long enough.