Émilie Allard

Point d’ironie point d’orgue
10.26–11.25.2023
Room 2

Artist Émilie Allard is mindful of the unknowable; that which is beyond the limits of common textual and formal languages. By transforming what surrounds her, she emphasizes the unexpected associations between words and things through a prism of connections, excess, derision, reference, and the inconceivable. This attention to the unknown incites her to compose poetic prose on sibylline subjects and create assemblages of found objects that she subverts and shapes into incomparably unique sculptural-writings. Some of these are the result of anticipatory reflexes; others, in majority, are clearly improvised based on what she discovers through research. For Allard, making art means creating the possible and even the impossible. She perpetuates what exists and conceives what doesn’t. Like “sense beings,” her works are combined with percepts and affects that transpose new possibilities of existence in different materials. Each piece supports the production process.

In this exhibition, the sculptures are marked by coincidences. Many of Allard’s recent works make formal and material references to musical instruments. Together, they resemble either bagpipes (Muse, 2023), a trumpet lyre (Le rêve et l’argent, 2023), or a lithophone (Coffre, 2023). These impracticable instruments occupy space in the gallery like a silent symphony. There is no sound, but they are united in visual harmony. This orchestra of ready-mades challenges our perception by making us see music without hearing a sound. We can imagine the tones and sustained notes of the stringed objects, drums, or wind instruments. Beyond them, a photo diptych is hung high up on the wall; an immense pair of misshapen ears exacerbates our desire to detect sounds (Morse, 2023). For us as viewers, the sense of waiting for the music to begin persists. The title of the exhibition is revealing. The point d’orgue, or fermata, is a musical symbol in the shape of a dot topped by a semi-circle that serves to prolong the duration of the note or the silence over (or under) which it is placed. The fermata thus indicates an indeterminate suspension of the tempo. And so we find ourselves at the apex of a sustained silence that invites us to more closely examine the subtle plastic qualities of a language of improbable, and moreover, indescribable forms. A box of minerals that have been de-reconstructed in the shape of an irony mark — a punctuation mark placed at the end of a sentence to denote irony or sarcasm — acts as a mechanism for flutes composed of unusual objects, each one more bizarre than the next (Point d’ironie, 2023). A stone reveals the artist’s actions and the important role intuition plays in art-making (Filon, 2023). Evoking a musical score, highlighted in bronze and copper powder, it is carved with different indexical symbols that are inherent to this entire body of work.

On the floor, works resembling the soles of shoes or footprints are reminiscent of mortuary sandal designs derived from traditional veneration ceremonies and almost incantatory funeral rites of bygone eras. Toes cast in aluminum rest on discarded polystyrene soles found in the streets of Montreal (Zone, 2022). The toe post between the first and second toes is roughly shaped like The Spirit of Ecstasy, the hood ornament of Rolls Royce vehicles. Cut-out aluminum footprints are fastened like platforms onto organ-pipe-like tubes. Between them, a small bell hangs (Point d’orgue, 2023).

— Jean-Michel Quirion