Voir et regarder

In the era of publicizing intimacy in an increasingly intrusive and indiscreet society, Isabelle Fexa intersects the seeing and looking in a very particular dialectical relationship. In fact, on the one hand, the artist observes, through the eye of her camera, intimate behaviours such as an investigator letting herself be guided by chance, the taste for risk and uncertain opportunism. On the other hand, the artist unearths, picks up and exhumes objects thrown into the garbage in order to list them, make an inventory and classify them as true confessional pieces, thus making it possible to create archives of the intimate.

For several years, the singularity of Isabelle Fexa’s artistic work has existed in her object of study and the way she understands it in our contemporary society. Applying social science methodologies of direct observation from a position of exteriority, the artist sets out to conquer the ethnology of intimacy. From then on, Isabelle Fexa reveals the hidden parts of an individual, the most honest parts of one’s identity, taking from it traces destined for certain destruction.

The Voir et regarder exhibition presents this process of objectivising the intimate, transgressing private spaces to make the ordinary, the everyday and the trivial the subject of investigation. Photographs of typical suburban house facades enter into dialogue with annotated envelopes and scribbled papers. Writing becomes an act of revealing the most personal and hidden thoughts, memories and secrets. Everything is exposed in a space that could evoke the living room of an individual, if not that of the artist in a transposed version, inviting the visitor to become a voyeur, an observer of this intimacy.

In any case, Isabelle Fexa explores this behavioural phenomenon, displaying the various forms that it can take in our current environments. The artist reveals different relationships between private and public space, inside and outside, that we generally seek to oppose. She shows the links that these spaces maintain between them as permanent back-and-forth movements. Moreover, the exhibited images are intrinsically charged with a disconcerting narrative potential, inviting us to let these vestiges stimulate our imagination.

Thus, by making the intimate public in a cultural space, Isabelle Fexa sets out traces of personal memory to humanistic consequences. Voir et Regarder situates intimacy at the intersection of a sealed secret and a delivered truth; it pushes the limits of what is shown and what is hidden, what is offered to the eye or what is snatched from view.

– Essay by Louise Brunet

Isabelle Fexa holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Université de Montréal. Between the act of spying and collecting, the still image and the moving image, Isabelle Fexa wonders about human relationships and the desire to develop a certain sensitivity among individuals outside the frameworks of dominant social interactions. Her works have been presented Galerie Les Territoires, the J.-A. de Sève Theater at Concordia University and at Carrefour des Arts et Sciences at Université de Montréal as part of the International Digital Art Biennial. Voir et Regarder is her first solo exhibition.

–

Louise Brunet holds a Bachelor’s degree in Private Law and Art History in France (Lyon). She is in the second year of a Master’s Degree in Museology, in a joint program of Université du Québec à Montréal and Université de Montréal. Her studies explore issues related to the current impacts, challenges and consequences of the development of digital spaces in museological institutions from a legal viewpoint, with the result of rethinking classical museum functions and strategies. Finally, in addition to being responsible for the digital learning mission for the Encyclopédie raisonnée, TECHNÈS, of cinema technique and technology, the author has published several articles in Espace art actuel magazine in 2016 and 2017.