Julie Tremblay's Reflections exhibition - Essay by Gary Michael Dault

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JULIE TREMBLAY’S REFLECTIONS: SCULPTURAL PRESENCE AND ITS DOUBLE

When you gaze at one of Julie Tremblay’s sculptures, or, more tellingly, stand close to one, you may see it more as anti-sculpture than sculpture per se—each appears to be an energetic presence in space that shimmers and scintillates as if it were an emanation from or an effulgence of some initial sculptural fact.

Generally speaking, the figurative tradition in Western art has supported heaviness. A compressed history of the last century of the Western figure would show us Rodin piling sculptural material (plaster, bronze) onto the figurative idea and then, almost immediately, Giacometti carving it all away again, creating the gaunt, sinewy, tensile remnant that is representative (and represented) man in the age of anxiety.

But Tremblay seems to have inherited another, more recent tradition. The work making up Reflections—these airy figures that swoop like angels and trapeze artists, that hang like monkeys, that start out from the wall, that billow like smoke and glitter like collections of dust motes suspended in raking light—seems pretty clearly connected to this century, and in particular, to the spaceworld of weightlessness, the virtual world of explorable projection, the world of AutoCAD and wireframe imaging, of digital innerspace and cultural hallucination.

In a sense, Julie Tremblay’s mercurial figures are more profoundly related to drawing than they are to sculpture. Where sculpture displaces space with its own provocative and importunate masses, drawing proceeds by encasement, by enclosure. British art critic Roger Fry used to recount how, when he once asked a little girl in school what drawing was, she replied “first I think—then a draw a line around my think.” Like Fry’s schoolgirl, Tremblay provides, if not a line, then a skin around her “think.” This skin is demonstrably porous, permeable, a twinkling steel membrane (consisting of sheets of cast-off industrial sheet metal) that separates the “inside” of the sculpture from whatever is “outside” of it (though both fields, are, of course, continuous), but it serves as delineation enough to lend the figures Tremblay makes a surprising thereness (if not a palpability) that is active and persuasive—albeit fictive.

Tremblay’s figures are not so much models of the human figure as they are extrapolations from it. Shards of hi-tech Platonism, her airy personages are shadows of a sort, swooping and arcing and dangling through space—and not only through it: they are, in themselves, space. Which is to say, they take up space even as they create it.

In essence, then, her figures are propositions. They announce themselves as ideas—as ideas about human movement, vitality, possibility and, therefore, identity. Unlike the human body with its bone-based architecture, Tremblay’s figures are essays in a curious kind of transparent morphology—figures you can not only look at, but look through. Which is probably why they seem both so physical (as in clearly, committedly constructed) and, at the same time, so ethereal.

This continuous, inescapable sense of difference in Tremblay’s work, this conflation of inside and outside in her figures, the strange congruency of their sense of presence and absence, their role as sculpture and anti-sculpture, all work to position her figures simultaneously as euphorically liberating images of the unfettered self (like William Blake’s moving images of the newly released soul peeling away from the dead body) and—by disturbing contrast—as merely frivolous echoes of the once dense and locatable human fact.

Their ongoing provocation—and their ultimate seriousness—lies in their doubleness: in the fact that her figures may well represent the human spirit in a gravitation-free and, therefore, morally transcendent triumph over the sublunary and, at the same time, offer a troubling image of the human being without substance. Do they embody a new kind of evolutionary freedom? Or are they bound by their boundlessness, as figures more devoted to avoidance and escapism than to taking a stand? Their newness lies entirely in this ambiguity.

Gary Michael Dault, Toronto, March 25, 2008

Gary Michael Dault is a Toronto-based writer, painter and art critic. His visual arts review column, “Gallery-Going,” appears every Saturday in the Globe and Mail.