Artists Registry

Artist’s Statement on “Monument”

The huge and unusual U frames that I have been conceiving for years are referring to the modernist plan which is, in itself, an affirmative and solid sign of the Western faith in permanency and consistency. Becoming a frame, that plan presents a hole, a gap, which I often fill with images related to ephemeral events, reflecting a certain precariousness. This contrast between affirmation and frailness is a constant preoccupation in my work.
On September 11, 2001, in the morning, I was leaving for New York (from Montreal) to attend the opening of an exhibition, held at the World Commercial Center gallery. My work was included in the show. The huge flat plan frames, presenting some street shadows, were already hung on the walls around the courtyard. They stayed intact during the collapses of the Towers and in the following months, but I always refused to have them back. I would have never been able to look at these works peacefully, even if they were not referring directly to the memories of that awful destruction.
A year later, I was in residence in New York for a few months. My purpose was to take some shots of those long tiny stairs running along the buildings’ facades and giving, at dawn, the illusion that they are leading you nowhere, leaving you as if floating against the sky. On that very first sad anniversary, while everyone was mourning around me, I was struck by an abuse of photographic images on the street, recalling that terrible morning. They were often sold, without respect, to tourists passing by. During three or four months after that, I was unable to take a single photograph; I became totally allergic to that medium. So I stayed in the studio with the cardboard model of an empty U- frame, waiting for a transformation.
Slowly, over time, the “frame” took slightly the shape of an architectural configuration. Nothing precise; just an evocation; just a vague image revealed by the contours of the gap. The piece kept the human scale that has always been part of my work, but the image raised by it was suggesting something else; there was an uncertainty, a tension raised by it and also a very subtle play of illusionist scale. The image emerging was one of loss, precariousness, and absence. It was translating an emotion, the sensation of the constant human fragility. Monument is a silent metaphor, the one of an unforgettable breach touching the whole western world, shaking its absolute certainty.
This is only after I finished the piece, “Monument,” that I have been able to photograph those tiny firestairs against the Soho sky. I can say that more than ever during and after that period of time, my works – photographs and sculptures – translated that deep sense of precariousness that is our destiny.
-- Jocelyne Alloucherie