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Raymonde April Untitled from Équivalences 2 2009 Courtesy Les Territoires |
BM: In these language structures, these sentences or phrasings that she is creating visually, is there a recurring pattern?
ER: There is a pattern, but it’s unpredictable. One of the things that drew me to think more about her work is the fact that there is a pattern. You can actually make a typology of all of her images. I don’t know how many categories you’d have, but they wouldn’t be very numerous.
For instance, you would have some with landscapes as a central element. She will make jokes and say, “Well, this is that kind of image that I do.” So she does work within certain more or less fixed parameters. But how does that work when you put them together on the wall? That’s very tricky because we had sequenced all of the images in her studio and then when we came to hang them in each of the different spaces everything had to change—we had to rethink the process from the beginning because of the space.
In the last show that we put up, which was at Occurrence, one wall was a bit smaller than we had predicted, so we had to take one image and either remove it from the series or place it differently. She was sitting at her computer and changing the sequence virtually to see if it would work or not. The solution turned out to be very simple but it really took a lot of time to get to. It’s not as predictable as you might expect.
BM: The exhibition is sited at three galleries, each with a specific installation. There is also one video piece included. You’ve noted that you set out to make three different shows linked by a common visual language. I’m wondering if, in the end, these works can be considered individually or if they depend on one another for an overall meaning?
ER: That’s a tricky question, and I don’t think there’s a really clear answer. All of the images are autonomous. She could definitely take an image from this show and use it again it in a future project. But at the same time, all of these images were carefully balanced within a singular series that is considered an autonomous whole. So in that way the work takes on a new dimension or status. Then each series was also balanced in accordance with the other two series and with the video. You do end up with a mutually defining process.
BM: And this comes back to your idea of the exhibitions as a study of April’s “method” as opposed to a standard gallery display of her works?
ER: Exactly. The video is very interesting, too. For many of the photographs in the show, she actually had a corresponding video clip, because she was using a digital camera with a video component. Sometimes she would photograph a scene and sometimes she would use video to capture it with a certain amount of time.
You could hypothetically create an entirely new series with video that would have equivalence with the other shows of still photography. But then video has its own language, the language of montage. It has its own structure and limits, so you have to work in a different way. It’s very interesting to see this video in light of seeing the other shows. You start to recognize an experience of déjà vu, but there is also something new happening because of sound and duration.
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