Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 3: Sévérine Hubard "Coupé Coincé".

"Home is in your head"

Warren Defever








Severine Hubard is a french artist whom I had never heard from, but judging from her website, she is already quite prolific at such a young age (she was born in 1977).


Nevertheless, prolific doesn't automatically imply quality, and as much as I enjoyed certain of its insights, I keep reserves about Hubard's piece at Skol called "Coupé Coincé" (2004), which have been lauded by the local press, and which constitutes the conclusion show of her residency at Galerie Est-Nord-Est in St-Jean-Port-Joli.

What's wrong Ced ?

What's with the grumpy attitude all of a sudden?

Well, it's not a bad exhibit. I complain solely because on the matter of disrupting familiar architecture, there has been (and I have seen) a lot of ferociously interesting works in recent years, and the Severine show left me with the after-taste thought of "too little, too late".


Quickly, the centre piece of the show is the prototype exoskeleton of a traditional Quebec house (its shape was influenced by houses in the Chauddière-Appalaches county), that she installed on its side, perpendicularly to standard housing position. You must enter it by crawling through a chimney, if you want to see the 4 principal elements that are hidden inside: a hole-as-window where you can pop your head out like Alice in Wonderland, one door exposed on its side as leading to an imaginary place (you will need a LOT of imagination to infer that, as it looks set up for restoration), a small wood scale that leads to the "roof" (the front side of the house) where you can observe a couple flower pots thrown there perhaps a little too nonchalantly, and finally, so you are not left too disappointed, the addition of an older work which is a small diaporama that you must action on your own, showing a multitude of parked cars (one per slide). This latter self-consciously-boring piece actually made me smile. It's genuinely been incorporated with this present installation (I wrote the title down somewhere buy can't find that piece of paper for the moment). These cars (and trucks and boats) are microscosms of the domestic world. Here, they appear dumbfounded, like they are waiting on a leash for their "masters" to come back. It's as if Severine meant to infer the little soul they seem to lack, when actually they are directly linked with a wide range of personal histories. Being so common and out there, we tend to ignore them visually. Hubard is pulling our attention, at the distress of the rest of her installation.

But the car piece on its own wouldn't have been enough (there's a gallery to fill here), and the house is unfortunatelly deceiving quickly after the surprise of first sight.
Nicolas Mavrikakis does his best to defend it in the journal Voir, pointing at the fact that contemporary arts of today are getting bigger than the homes they were originally intended for. But on this topic of reappropriating traditional architecture through art, I'm reminded of a plethora of artists, not the least the german Gregor Schneidor, who won the Venice Biennial with the deconstructive reconstitution of his grandmother's home. Then closer to us, Julie André T cut in two a whole gallery space, with her fabulous performance-apartment project at Dare Dare (I must add here that I've got my own project that deals with shapes of traditional Quebec homes, but that is a wildly different proposal).

The only thing that differs between Severine Hubard's home and these projects is that her's functions as much as a sculpture than as an environment. But than, perhaps this is where it missed its goal: sculpturally, it sucked. I'm forced to employ a term that the artist used to describe her work: it looked like "bricolage". Something made by a collective of kids during parascolar school activities. The idea is brilliant but it's not pulled up to what it could have been. The show works like the blueprint of what it wishes to achieve.


Luckily for us (or her), Severine added another layer to her exhibition.
The real success of this show comes from the manner in which Hubard infiltrated
the standard working spaces of Skol with a series of preparatory works, that the visitor is forced to visit prior getting to the house entrance.

The pieces themselves, once you found them (I counted 7, with an introductory text), aren't too dramatically moving (a profile of a horse made of wood, a tiny house model, a much larger model of the Skol show, a collage of housing ads, 3 drawings of piles of chairs, and a photographic panorama of an earlier work when she aligned windows on the side of a building in Europa). The big fun here is the way these settings are intrusive, and how Hubard is allowing us to visit what is normally hidden from us (what Nicolas Mavrikakis calls "the foundations of the house"). In that sense, the offices in a gallery space are the opposite of the white cube. They are filled with people working and well, people are just naturally messy. They put posters on doors, decorations on walls, piles of mails on furnitures. Hubard had to negociate the spaces where she could insert her own materials. There was no map or indications on anything so I had to ask to make sure I wasn't missing anything (oops, right there: the rocking baby chair with circular pads, see what I mean?). For this portion alone, if only it didn't only consist of its preambule, the show had something to bite on.


The substantial "home project" here is not the half-baked sculpture, but the investigations of the living space of Skol's employees. I find infiltrative and "parasitic" art to be the "coup du jour". The best art trend revival of recent.

Wherever Severine is going next, she surely got the potential to amaze simply because
she is already curious enough herself for looking at life from unusual perspectives. This half-gown of an exhibit couldn't make anyone pronunce themselves on her pertinence. On the contrary, it can only titillate our curiosity in apprehending how this will lead her to future proposals.



Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Séverine Hubard: "Coupée coincée"
Nov 11 - Dec 18, 2004
Skol, 372 Ste-Catherine W., #314 398-9322