Valérie Blass: La poudre aux yeux: Of smoke in mirrors

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Valérie Blass, "Le diable est dans les détails," 2019, pitchers, heat-shrink tubing, acrylic, oil, gouache, 47" x 9" x 4"

What is a ghost without a sheet? An invisible form, the memory of an individual partially physicalized, a history made present and visible only from a thin layer of fabric, a form indifferent to gravity and physics. A ghost occupies a space between this plane and another unknowable one, inhabiting both spaces simultaneously.

In La poudre aux yeux: Of smoke in mirrors, a survey of the most recent sculptures of Montreal-based artist Valérie Blass, the works share a similar disregard for the boundaries of physical reality, the body and its inherited cultural categories. The suggestion of bodily presence has haunted her practice, here explicitly or subtly figured anew in each work. To be clear, these works do not rely purely on simple, uncanny tricks for their effect, but confound through a layered multitude of visual and intellectual surprises.

For Blass, the dominant categorical boundaries of the history of art—the separations of sculpture from photography from painting, and figuration from abstraction—are lightened, released, floated, pushed through and recombined. While Blass’s work has almost always been rooted in the realities and complexities of sculpture and the body, and their attendant art histories, with this exhibition she explicitly challenges preconceptions of how bodies, sculptural form and vernacular clothing and objects are expected to behave in relation.

These sculptures do not sit comfortably in one realm, but expand and brush past borders with intense material literacy, vigorous humour, and a skillful and curious visual adeptness. Here, the gendered public language of personal adornment, the clothing that indicates the figure and their accoutrements, are mismatched, creating new forms and slippery suggestions, an uncertainty about who is wearing what and why.

Observed together, the relations between works can be inferred or extrapolated. Informed by each other, but not content only to repeat, the works have been built off of one another, mimicking the studio process, still joking amongst themselves and challenging their own art historical predecessors.

These figures are eccentrically and undeniably convincing, real and simultaneously strange, trompe l’oeils in three dimensions, layering odd details and logic to create new understandings and intentional confusions of the material and cultural world. Each chases a state of confusion, but doesn’t just hover mysteriously—to experience these works is to have observation and expectation generously challenged, material and bodily knowledge subverted. 

The gallery is now open Saturdays 12–5pm and will be following recommended health protocols.