An Art for the Everyday

Every time I walk through one of Elizabeth LeMoine's recent installations, I feel like the transient renter that Michel de Certeau refers to in his description of the act of reading. He says that during reading, the world of the reader slips/mutates into that of the author and this act "makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient". LeMoine has been proffering her property of memories and desires through the "furnishings"- tiny, ephemeral, mundane objects of every day life - of her installations meticulously constructed from found materials. LeMoine's turn away from large sculptures might have been an accident of schooling, but her "turn of phrase" - to borrow once more from de Certeau - was purely her own and extremely timely. Now that aesthetic values are up for grabs, not only has her commitment to record the mundane and fragile brought the "real" back into artistic practice, but her work performs a much needed critique on the favoured discourses of the "body" and "representation".

To the visitor most familiar with the art that has been worked over the latest art theoretical "take" Elizabeth LeMoine's work will appear at one end of the scale incomprehensible and at the other end "kitschy". How is one to interpret these elaborate miniatures of seemingly irrelevant objects, strewn about the exhibition space? LeMoine's work demands different "ways of seeing" - it demands proximity, intimacy, touching; it demands our bodies. The scale of the objects, the attention to detail, the objects' conspicuous placement, all require us to move about and around the installation in order to find them, to see them better, to imagine what we might have done with them. She forces us not to be static: we must bend, look closely, react, and in the process of moving across space, we cross boundaries between past and present - hers and ours - between here and elsewhere, between inside and out, between her stories and ours. While "walking" and "reading" her installations we are constantly aware of our location, the distance between her objects and us, her time and ours. We continuously negotiate between positions of what she has given us and our own situated self - we become embodied. LeMoinešs deceptively simple installations hide an extremely sophisticated understanding of history and embodiment, both of which are the products of many displacements, comparisons, memories, and desires accumulated during attempts to "read" and "write" life in the big post-industrial cities of the west. Once she said,

For me, this ["writing" the city] has resulted in a place for the emotional, stammering, irrational "self" to perceive the spots of beautiful disjunction in the surface of order, to respond with contradictions of my own, and to begin recalling stories. Then, I begin, with tiny stitches in cast off carrier bags, with preoccupied manipulation of scraps of found materials, to manifest the silent fragments of the story that I see unfolding, a collaboration between my own past and the gargantuan anthology of "the City", a story where the identities of the macrocosm and microcosm, coincide.

As we move through the installation we occupy a series of "seeing" positions that LeMoine has mapped out for us, we become part of it, and just like de Certeau's "renter", we activate it with our own memories and desires - we make her space "habitable" with our own narratives. LeMoinešs simultaneous use and subversion of given ideologies manifests the positions/dilemmas of feminists still on the look out for real historical changes. Her syncretic mix of traditional, modern, and post modern objects mirrors "the City" as we live it. Going through one of Elizabeth LeMoine's installations becomes an exercise in understanding the relations between an embodied subject and the world around her; her work operates as theory/lesson about the situated nature of experience and politics alike. Paraphrasing Jeanette Winterson I shall ask you as you go through the exhibit "to trust her; she is telling us stories".

Caterina Pizanias, Calgary, Alberta