Les soins des Amazones @squarefemininity

Gallery II

Make-up, masks, invention. Images circulate before our eyes, on our screens. They creep, tentacular, into our lives, our bodies, our desires. They don’t lie. They reveal nothing. They fascinate. They are perfect. Baillargeon’s wacky, sometimes funny and often disturbing aesthetic is a reflection on the plasticity of the female body. In the form of a self-fictive experiment, the artist invites us to consider different ways of producing a body, in order to counteract the female imagery that digital media and consumerist culture convey. For the duration of an exhibition, she becomes one of the hybrid creatures that populate our news feeds.

Social, capitalist and gendered fictions traverse the female body, shaping and conditioning it with oppressive expectations that influence its appearance and tend towards homogenization. As critical as she is amused, as suspicious as she is intrigued, the artist participates in the game of fiction. Using a variety of media and supports, Baillargeon explores this fictional production of women, in particular that of perfectibility and eternal youth. In her performances for the camera, she presents herself using beauty products and appliances in a clumsy, deviant way, diverting the instructions and tutorials that promote the gestures of care. Both model and guinea pig, she turns these promotional tools into a ritual, a sacrament or an asceticism. These gestures show her relationship to her body. Aging, weight gain, sexuality, childbirth, post-partum and menopause are all addressed in a way that integrates them into this fiction of women. The artist suggests that taking care of one’s image also means assuming one’s weaknesses, imperfections and fatigue.

The images presented form a system of relationships that interweave the cosmetics industry, social networks and skincare rituals. As the works unfold, a certain perspective emerges: the body embodied in ritual is grappling with its own materiality. To the various “techniques of the self” that confine and capture the female fictions, the body formulates a simple response: I am not a utopia, I invent myself, I heal myself. It’s an ambiguous response, coextensive with the fiction of female perfection, but one that also produces an assertive form of autofiction. As the irony of the exhibition’s title suggests, this is also where the strength of the feminist gesture lies, as it seeks to “escape fiction through fiction.”¹

¹Nicole Brossard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman / She Would Be the First Sentence of My Next Novel (Mercury Press, 1998), p. 98.

Text by Émile Lévesque-Jalbert

Authors Bio 

Émile Lévesque-Jalbert is a doctoral student in the French section of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His research focuses on ecological thought, the literary arts and contemporary French and francophone literature. His work has been published in Québec, France and the United States.

Artists Bio 

Annie Baillargeon was born in Victoriaville, and holds a bachelor’s degree in visual art from Université Laval in Québec City, where she lives and works. She has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions at artist-run centres and museums, as has participated in numerous major events in Quebec, Canada, the United States, South America and Europe. She co-founded two performance collectives: Les Fermières obsédées (2001–2015) and B.L.U.S.H. in 2015. Chiguer art contemporain represents her work in Montreal and Quebec City. Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

Acknowledgements

Etienne Boucher, Encadrements François Simard, Emile Levesques Jalbert, Ricardo Savard, La Bande Vidéo and CALQ for funding the project.

Video credit: Noémie da Silva

Photo credit: Jean-Michael Seminaro