I first heard of Elodie Royer and Yoann Gourmel in 2007, when both were still working at GB Agency, an innovative Parisian gallery where our mutual friend Raimundas Malasauskas was crafting a typically fanciful project titled “The Last Piece by John Fare,” spun around a character purported to hail from Toronto. It was around this fantastical piece of apocrypha that our connection began, inching Paris and Toronto a little closer to each other.
It was not until a stop in Paris in the summer of 2009 that I met Royer and Gourmel in person, on a cafe terrace near the Centre Pompidou. They were returning from Art Basel and were alive with ideas. As they described their many projects, I was struck by their humility in relation to their accomplishments and also by their easy and generous air. In the course of our conversation, they mentioned a recent scooter purchase. I was amused at the image of this lean curatorial team weaving through the streets on a shared commute. I now see this vehicle, pliant, precise and sustainable, as emblematic of their curatorial approach. It is perhaps on the strength of their own partnership that they have been able to evolve a compassionate ethic of exhibition-making based on a process of negotiation and deliberation among peers. For a shifting constellation of artist friends, Royer and Gourmel operate as a catalyzing force, transforming shared ideas into shows, conferences, screenings, performances and publications. I found their spirit akin to the founding ethos behind artist-run centres like Mercer Union, where I worked at the time, and it seemed only natural that I should invite them to present a project under our auspices.
In 2011, that opportunity came with the fortuitous Toronto arrival of French cultural attaché Claire Le Masne, who was passionately pursuing the mandate of developing ties between Paris and Toronto. I immediately wrote to Royer and Gourmel, inviting them to prepare a show for Toronto that would highlight their record of collaborations. I travelled to Paris in October to coincide with Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) and embarked on a concentrated schedule of studio visits, criss-crossing between Montmartre, Belleville and the Marais on an itinerary kindly devised by the curators that included meetings with Isabelle Cornaro, Julien Crépieux, Mark Geffriaud, Benoît Maire, Bruno Persat and Raphaël Zarka.
Then working as free agents, Royer and Gourmel had just been appointed associate curators at Le Plateau, a venue that is part of the network of French collections of contemporary art dispersed across the country. I met with them at a bright and airy studio space shared with Maire on rue des Panoyaux. We discussed the practical matters of the show in Toronto—the baseline budget and the opportunities for extra funding we would have to pursue to be able to fly the artists here. I left it open to them to develop the rest of the details, dangling only one piece of bait: an archival view of the interior of our gallery space at 1286 Bloor Street West, once a cinema named the Academy, founded in 1913.
I returned to the small building of artist ateliers to visit with Maire, who is known for aesthetic investigations that intersect with philosophical concerns. Our discussions lead us to the figure of Glenn Gould, whom Maire was adopting as a character in his film Le Berger (2011). After our visit, I sent him a recording of one of Gould’s CBC radio programs to encourage his research on this well-known Torontonian.
When I met Persat and Crépieux, they were sharing a flat in a quirky 1962 high-rise designed by the firm of Roger Anger. We began our visit in the congenial setting of their kitchen and saw out the window what looked like snow flurries but turned out to be an upstairs neighbour shaking out a duvet. This scene of high-density urban living was the perfect atmosphere in which to discuss Persat’s recent research into the story of Marcel Lachat, a young Swiss man who, in 1970, searching in vain for a larger apartment to accommodate his newborn daughter, came up with the innovative solution of a “bulle pirate,” an unauthorized pod he affixed to the side of the apartment complex they were inhabiting. Since Persat makes site-specific works, this impromptu architectural subversion was perfectly aligned with his own methods. He had recently tracked down Lachat to discuss the inspirational act.
Crépieux’s work also enjoys a theme of historical return, through select appropriations from cinema. The piece Re: wind blows up (2010), for example, is a painstaking reanimation of stills from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, processed through a colour photocopier and animated by falling through the air. Crépieux’s innovative adaptations lend new forms to known images. Considering this interest in breaking down images, we discussed the influence of structural filmmaking and he mentioned his admiration for the work of Michael Snow, again linking back to my home city.
In the course of the studio visits, I was introduced to several more artists involved in research-based work. Notably, Zarka was pursuing with great zeal the origin and proliferation of the geometric form known as the rhombicuboctahedron. His previous series Riding Modern Art (2007) traced the intersection of skateboard culture and the legacy of modernist public art. This research was synthesized into the book On a Day with no Waves: A Chronicle of Skateboarding, 1779–2009 (2011).
Geffriaud was also engaged in an architectural pursuit. In his project Shelter (2011–ongoing), he is slowly assembling a house, using every new exhibition opportunity to add an element to the eventual home. On return to Toronto, I discussed this project with artist Jon Sasaki, who likened the enterprise to the Johnny Cash hit song “One Piece at a Time,” the story of an automotive worker stealing Cadillac parts over several decades to finally form his own, if Frankenstein-like, vehicle. As Geffriaud has recently become a father, I feel that this gesture resonates with the radical solution proposed by Lachat for his own family’s habitat in 1970.
In my visit to Cornaro’s studio in the Cité internationale des arts building in Montmartre, I was struck by her strong historical sensibility. In Reproductions (2012), an image is loosened from its source through a process of alteration. More precisely, a quick spray-paint sketch on paper acts as a vague proxy of a historical referent, such as an Impressionist landscape. The sketching gesture is documented by Super 8 camera, and the resulting footage is transferred to video, which, in turn, serves as instruction to an artist on how to constitute the image as a much larger-scale wall painting. These formal somersaults counter the claims of lossless compression touted by technological innovators, offering instead an abstraction and a reduction of historical memory.
Following my trip, I continued these discussions via email, preparing for the exhibition, set to open in September 2012. With each of their projects, Royer and Gourmel tend to favour the use of guiding texts—often literary passages, but also filmic references and other source documents—to shape the creative process. For their exhibition in Toronto, they proposed to springboard off of Hollis Frampton’s cycle of films Hapax Legomena (1971–72). A Greek term meaning words that occur only once in a particular context, the title referred to the fact that though the curators had worked with these artists previously, this opportunity at Mercer Union would be nonetheless singular.
In the last planning stages of the exhibition, we exchanged a few favours. Scott Miller Berry, executive director of Toronto’s Images Festival, went and collected a mysterious artwork named Cyrus (2009) from Janice Guy in New York. Cyrus is an object Geffriaud stole from an artist, promising only to return it if this friend could identify what went missing. The item has been carried across continents, wrapped in another layer of tape each time it is put in the hands of a new caregiver so as to further blur its mysterious contours. To reciprocate the favour, we sent Persat to collect a 16-mm print from Paris film distributor Light Cone, to be screened in Early Monthly Segments, an experimental film series in Toronto co-organized by Berry along with my friend Kate MacKay and my husband, Chris Kennedy—another informal Paris-Toronto exchange.
In artist spaces, necessity creates invention, but it also makes for incredible efficiency and economy. Mobile projects, assembled on site rather than shipped in containers, have often been the inclination of Royer and Gourmel. For the Toronto project, we came to the accord that many of the works would be made on site, save for a few small works that the curators and artists would pack in their suitcases. The rest would come to life at Mercer Union. And rather than expend precious exhibition monies on hotels and restaurant bills, we rented a house for the guests to inhabit communally. Through this creative solution, we were able to host the two curators and a total of five artists. We settled on a house in Cabbagetown, to give them a little of the flavour of old Toronto. This included the judging looks of surrounding neighbours when the visitors smoked in front of the house—underlining a cultural divide between Paris and Toronto. Our guests were also introduced to Canadian wildlife through a series of nocturnal raccoon visits.
The final line-up of works involved all the artists I had met on my 2011 trip to Paris, along with Aurélien Froment, Cyrille Maillot, Benoît-Marie Moriceau and Chloé Quenum. Several of the artists ran with the source photo of the cinema interior. Geffriaud added pendant lamps to the gallery, replicating the location of the former theatre lights along with a period early-20th-century switch, all part of his ongoing Shelter project. One of Cornaro’s Reproductions, composed through thin applications of spray paint, served to establish a cloudy yellow, blue and pink ground around which the other figures in the show dance. Persat tested the dynamics of space by exhibiting a Fred Sandback–like string sculpture alongside a pre-existing carousel of 80 slides demonstrating the shadow cast by this form. Crépieux had just completed the edit of Microfilm (2012), an elaborate and sympathetic deconstruction of Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) that mimics the original camera motions by shooting off of television sets that play the film dispersed through a vacant house. This new work was projected in a small area in the back gallery delimited by a black curtain, thus constituting a kind of micro-cinema. Froment presented his short films Nine Intervals (2011–12), which the local Revue Cinema projected daily as trailers before feature films. Quenum transformed the Mercer Union side patio into an improvised studio, applying chlorine washes to a dark fabric and working it to the point of achieving a delicate rose tint. The cloth was then stretched into a folding tripartite screen, taking the idea of the frame from still life to moving picture. Moriceau searched our location for evidence of its history, scavenging elements from neighbourhood thrift stores for props to prompt narratives he composed. The objects, partially concealed behind one-way mirror filters, came in and out of view, depending on timed lights. The fictional, poetic aspect of Moriceau’s contribution is something I also identify strongly with Royer and Gourmel’s projects.
In an email from 2011, Persat described Royer and Gourmel’s online portfolio as “centraliz[ing] mysteriously a lot of the dirty pretty things we do.” In the course of our install, we experienced the rawness of working in a just-in-time production mode, when Maillot’s piece, subject to unexpected material delays, came to life just hours before the opening reception. Consisting of aluminum sheets cut to resemble grates, the work brought air vents—normally the bane of the white cube—to prominence in a hanging that recalls de Stijl design principles. One of my favourite records of the consensus-based curatorial model exemplified in “Hapax Legomena” is a photo showing a total of five people consulting on the placement of this one work.
Today, some remnants of the exhibition survive—Cyrus is still in my care, and this article, a recollection of the project, is now in print.
The exhibition “Hapax Legomena” took place at Mercer Union from September 14 to October 20, 2012.
