CONCEALED, REVEALED by Lucy R. Lippard (2019)

Carrie Perreault’s work is rooted in a courageous exploration of her own vulnerability. She has found simplicity to be the best tactic to convey complex emotional subject matter, like childhood trauma and mental health. She notes that she expends “great effort to achieve minimal results.” I assume that’s minimal in the sense of the classic 1960s art movement rather than the work’s affect. Although (mostly male) minimalists rejected psychological content for a “what you see is what you get” aesthetic, women working in similar modes introduced from the beginning a different kind of content, conveyed by repetitive, labor-intensive mark-making and the use of materials evoking personal and psychological connotations, such as hair or body imagery. This is where Perreault’s performances and sculptures come in.    

Embracing “gestural acts without narrative closure” (ambiguity being at the heart of so much contemporary art), Perreault tackles issues of “emotional correctness,” recalling early feminist works from the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when audiences accustomed to mostly male art were shocked by intimate details of women’s lives and lived experience. Works like Judy Chicago’s Red Flag(a bloody tampax being withdrawn from a woman’s body) and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Documentabout motherhood or Ana Mendieta’s rape performance were new to fine art. Perreault’s visceral videos are heirs to such work.

In For once in your life, just let it go, we are exposed for what seems like a long time to a closeup of the artist’s wet open mouth with even white teeth (and lipstick). An extended bout of self-inflicted tooth-cleaning with a dental floss holder lasts until the gums bleed, and then some. Is this about torture? Or hygiene? Or everyday masochism? The lipstick and bright red nail polish on the hand that does the work show off the subject’s gender. The video’s small scale, bringing the viewer too close for comfort, balances on the brink of voyeurism and even eroticism but never fulfills such expectations. Perreault has called it “a method of self-harm that could be construed as self-care.” 

A second video, Untitled (eggs),would be mesmerizing but somewhat incomprehensible without knowing that when the artist was in kindergarten, the school’s janitor made a habit of breaking eggs over her head – an incomprehensible act. In the video, Perreault sits straight in a chair, stoically staring ahead as an accomplice (dressed the same way, a twin?) slowly and deliberately picks up one of a line of eggs on a nearby windowsill and cracks it over her head. Deadpan, she never moves, despite gooey lines of egg dripping down her head and body. This ritual of closure ends when the eggs are used up and the accomplice departs.   

Over My Dead Bodyis an Andre-like minimal sculpture of flat plates altered through an extremely detailed process involving melamine forms for concrete, bathed in muriatic acid baths, layered in more concrete, and eventually sanded, leaving traces of painting, drawing, and other actions that lie beneath. The result looks industrially strong but is in fact quite fragile.  This continues a feminist tradition of altering the precise minimal grids that were prevalent when feminist art took off around 1970, such as Howardena Pindell’s soft grid sculpture or Harmony Hammond’s later bandaged grids.

Perreault employs art as a vessel for working out issues in her life, a kind of personal art-and-life equation. “Things that were meant to be concealed reveal themselves,” she says. “This is a thread that runs throughout my work.”  

 

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, sometime curator, author of 24 books on contemporary art and cultural criticism, including From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, Eva Hesse,The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, and most recently Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. She has co-founded various artists’ organizations and publications. She lives off the grid in rural Galisteo, New Mexico, where for 23 years she has edited the monthly community newsletter: El Puente de Galisteo.  

KNOWING HURT AND SEEKING SALVE by Sky Goodden (2019)

The interior is not only the universe but also the étui of the private person. To live means to leave traces. The detective story that follows these traces comes into being. 

- Walter Benjamin 

Introducing The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson clarifies that she’s “less interested in art’s capacity to purge or master.” She wants to know its forms. Not a catharsis, more a bemused study, her beloved and bruising text suggests the possibility for trauma’s traces to be read as secret, as neutral, as fictive, as furtive, as owned, renamed, as recharged. Brutality can be used “as a bluff, as a bludgeon,” she admits. But in considering its formation through art, we meet its capacity for compassion, its effectiveness at working-through, and the various inroads and impasses abutted or gained through abstraction, figuration, narrative, or reenactment.

In the work of Carrie Perreault, a material and psychological affect are both achieved and demanded, none obvious but each one more pressing. Formally, they arrive as figurative or diffuse, provocative or muted. But functionally, Perreault solicits our memorial and sensorial vulnerability, expecting a certain amount of “giving over” in order to complete the work. 

Displaced from our “here and now” and yet found in our histories – the leafy interior of what Benjamin called our “forest reserve of remembering” – Perreault pivots on the head of trauma and spins its effects through a present-day accounting of illness, grief, and reparations. Agency muscles through, though, asking “What can we exhume and what can we exhaust on the page, on the pavement? What can we own through our retelling, or by refusing our confessing?” Mapping dubious narratives, obscuring sightlines, and demanding our trust, Perreault’s practice requires a romantic supplication. But also our skepticism. “What has been trespassed, here? What is left to save? What is now at stake?”

Perreault implicates us in a breathless, fruitless search for the origin of our hurt, and its final, unlikely salve. In Untitled (Eggs)(2018), she has eggs cracked overher head in a morbid reenactment of childhood trauma. Whether seeking its triggering or forcing its resolution, Perreault admitted to feeling weirdly fine, afterwards. Meanwhile her hired performer – her normally steady friend, now violator – evinced unusual agitation.

“The making of the work is incredibly onerous,” reflects Perreault, “but it isn’t about labour.” Privileging process allows the artist to pace through systems of abuse, and allows for thinking. “The work is onerous, but in the way of balancing in equal measure resistance and restraint.” She pauses. “It does so in quiet ways.”

Insisting on a largescale work that is “physically real” (“this is big, this is okay, it’s something of substance – also, this is the most I can handle,” she admits), Perreault’s Over My Dead Body(2019) demands every inch of its form. Across a broad swath of concrete panels, Perreault spray-paints, chalks, waxes, attaches rubber and lays cement, before sanding down and beginning the task of removal. “Some of the underneath part comes through,” she says. But inevitably it’s “a revealing moment, taken away.” Her process communes its subject’s secreting, silencing, shaming: still, these warped utterances demand the space they take. Like the controlled but fatefully shaking lines of a grid from Agnes Martin, or the muted yet urgent vessels from an unknowable Eva Hesse, much is uttered through the indefinable, indefatigable gestures of a willing, hurting artist. Perreault avows her pain like the breaking of a wave that was both sudden and, before that, eventual and disclosed. You saw it coming but couldn’t know it before it came, nor name it once it left. 

 

Sky Goodden is the founding publisher and editor of Momus (momus.ca), an international online art publication and podcast that stresses “a return to art criticism.” Momus has been shortlisted for two International Awards for Art Criticism since its inauguration in 2014, and has attracted over 850,000 readers. Goodden is currently the Artist-in-Residence at Montreal’s Concordia University (2018-19). She holds an MFA in Criticism & Curatorial Practice from OCAD University, which awarded her with an Alumni of Influence Award. She has published in Frieze, Modern Painters, Canadian Art, C Magazine, the National Post, and Art21.

IT’S A THIN LINE by Jennifer Rudder (2021)

Emovere, from the Latin verb ‘emovere,’ meaning to move out, remove or agitate, as well as to emote, or to express emotion. 

In the series of sculptural works Emovere, Carrie Perreault’s unique and startling work stands out, forcing us to pause and pull us in to take another look. Perreault employs common, domestic objects that appear alien, unrecognizable.  The shapes and sizes of the objects emit an uncanny familiarity suggesting the aura of the basement. Something in the basement.  Something we rely on, that is hidden, not visible or unacknowledged. At first glance, the sculptural shapes are familiar but separated from their utilitarian purpose and on view in an art gallery, the ventilation registers and galvanized steel connecting elbows are unrecognizable. Utilizing the standard materials to set broken bones - a mix of plaster and cement with pigments - the agents solidify hidden and unacknowledged elements that both support and heal. Separated from their usual position above our heads and camouflaged in the sickly colours of Pepto Bismol and Tensor compression bandages, Perreault’s solid objects of cooling and heating systems reflect our emotional and psychological connection to home.  

With its heavy deflated inner tubes, the work Sometimes I think I lost my guts too, hangs on gallery’s walls and evokes the sagging weight of the body’s internal organs. The melancholy ‘guts’ recall the prodigious work of female sculptors of the 1960s, such as Eva Hesse’s ‘New Minimalism’ in New York City, Jana Sterbak’s “Meat Dress” and body of work in 1980s Canada, and of course French American artist Louise Bourgeois’ demanding, often phallic pieces.  These seminal works were often critiqued as “severe.” With her lustrous, drooping rubber inner tubes, Perreault joins the legion of women artists who challenged the elevated position of the male sculptors of the time, drawing attention back to the body – inside as well as out. Then again, to ‘have guts’ means nerves of steel, and to have lost them, the sad-sack inner tubes could be seen as a loss of nerve or trepidation.

Perreault exhibits her first undertaking with VR (virtual reality) work in the newly renovated space The Shed at Gallery Stratford. Immersed, the viewer finds themselves in a state of clashing realities, recognizing both the made objects in the virtual space and an expansive encompassing photo of a panorama not unfamiliar to the region and Perreault's childhood landscape. The objects that clutter the viewer's immediate space are ghostly echoes of traffic pylons typically in orange and black stripes. While the viewer can walk through the virtual sculptures, the realistic scale challenges the viewer's relationship to the medium. Through the works on display, Perreault shows us what exactly is in front of us, but in doing so, she also redirects our path.