About —
For the past twenty years, Jannick Deslauriers has been known for her diaphanous textile works that explore concepts of memory, adaptation, and disappearance. More recently, her practice has encompassed new materials—steel, beeswax, silicone, and dust—that allow her to create large-scale, suspended installations. Suffused with strangeness, her sculptural work sensitively and poetically examines the human experience, our mutating world, and the passage of time.
Upon entry, Seuils [Thresholds] immediately immerses us in a ghostly replica of Deslaurier’s apartment, which has been transformed here into an aseptic room reminiscent of an incubator. Its translucent walls suggest an interweaving of the intimate and the institutional. They also imply that power dynamics may be at play in every living space. Sculptural elements inspired by medical equipment and hydraulic structures punctuate the installation, evoking the body’s presence and the inherent impact an environment can have on it. The fountain, as a symbol of continuous circulation and collective care, becomes the nodal point where memory and the unknown converge. Hybrid-looking objects play with a blurred temporality and elude unambiguous interpretation. At times they seem to have emerged from some forgotten past, or else project us into an uncertain future. On the edge of appearance and disappearance, their ethereal quality hints at the idea of erasure and point to the impermanence of places and things.
In this universe, the ordinary transforms into the strange, each turn surprising us with its unhomely appearance, a notion described by Mark Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie (2017). Deslauriers invites us into the intimacy of her apartment, an unsettling scene occupied by objects that have become silent witnesses to an anxious reality. As the strange borders the familiar, we are reminded that even personal spaces hold unexplored mysteries.
Seuils is an ambulatory experience, an invitation to cross the boundaries between the private and the public, the visible and the invisible, the immutable and the ephemeral. The unfinished forms in this liminal space solicit our imagination and call on us to fill in what’s missing, to see beyond absence and oblivion.
Booklet
Biography —
Born in Joliette, Québec, in 1983, Jannick Deslauriers currently lives and works in Montréal. After receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University in 2008, she spent the next decade developing a large body of translucid textile works. Recognized for her ethereal sculptures that address themes such as domesticity, memory, and destruction, Deslauriers examines the vulnerability of beings and of things, and their ability to adapt. In 2020, she pursued her MFA in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art, where she began a new body of work that incorporated materials such as steel, beeswax, silicone, and dust. She then shifted her interest to the anthropology of institutional equipment, such as from hospitals. Her work has since evolved into disquieting, suspended environments filled with hybrid objects resembling devices for support or restraint. Her time at Yale led her to create a major immersive installation (Phasmes) for her retrospective exhibition Être imaginaire at 1700 La Poste in the spring of 2023. Her project Chambres Blanches was presented at Worthless Studios in New York in the fall of 2023, and also at the most recent Manif d’art – Quebec City Biennial. In the spring of 2024, she took part in the international artist in residence program at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels. There, she developed a new installation that addressed the historical, sociopolitical, and mythological weight of fountains through the construction of an environment made of steel and silk that borrowed elements from gothic and science-fiction iconography. Deslauriers is currently preparing for her first exhibition at Trotter&Sholer in New York, in early 2025. Her works are included in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the Colección SOLO in Madrid.
This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Musée d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul.
The artist would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their support.
Images in the banner:
© Jannick Deslauriers, Chambres blanches (detail), 2024, view from the exhibition at la Chambre Blanche. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Béatrice Flynn