Without End
Chantal Gervais

Since 1997, I have put together a body of work that deals with the human body and its corporeality. The work reflects on the complexity of the body as both a site of lived experience and a powerful figure of representation.

The photographs show anonymous subjects in ambiguous physical and emotional states who appear as characters in unresolvable narratives. In the images, the isolation of the bodies in the dark, their nakedness and state of suspended motionlessness, strip them and the space of distinct clues to the subjects’ identity, race, class or culture. There is no evidence of the objects, people or external events that are acting on the figures. The photographs depict in intimate detail, pores, hairs, veins, wrinkles, wounds and physical reactions such as perspiration, swelling and redness. The work presents the body as a site of pain, pleasure, and death. It is intended to convey a sense of how insulated, unexplainable and intense our experience of the body can be, and by extension, reflect on the uncertainties of life.

The images vacillate between the seductive and the disturbing, between the attractive and the repulsive. The image are seductive because of the luscious beauty of the photographic surface, the sensuality and gracefulness of the bodies and the sense of intimate proximity to the subjects. The uneasiness is expressed through the wounds and aging of the bodies, the emptiness of their imagined past and pending future, and the way they are suspended in space as if in limbo. This endless shifting between contingent sets of meanings prevents any closure about the individuals and is intended to bring the viewer closer to the experience of the body.

The photographs interweave elements of representation of the body borrowed from science, art and popular culture in order to destabilize a straightforward reading and complicate attempts to classify or identify based on physical appearance. The overlapping of the different forms of representational practices negates the authority of any single reading and exposes how our understanding of the body is formed through representation.

In the images, the transient nature of life is evoked by the transgressions of the physical and social boundaries of the body and the disparate range of emotional reactions (desire, anxiety, fear, hope) the bodies give rise to. The photographs allude to our common human condition, the inherent mutability of life and our unwavering march towards death.

Artist Lecture: July 27, 2006, 7 – 8 pm
Exhibition date: July 27 – August 26, 2006

gallery   Galellis   Watamaniuk